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THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



THE 

DIVINE CHALLENGE 

BY THE REV. 

W. J. DAWSON, D. D. 

ii 




HODDER & STOUGHTON 
NEW YORK 
GEORGE H. DOBAN COMPANY 



COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



LC Control Number 
tm P 96 029062 



©CI.A261845 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 



Xp 


The Divine Challenge w m m l .j 


,13 


II. 


The Lamp and the Day Star . . w 


S3 


III. 


The Sovereignty of God . ; w M > 


51 


IV. 


Fulfilment m w w w m ^ w .. 


69 


V. 


TlMELESSNESS t .] w w M w w 


89 


vi. 




107 


VII. 


Elijah's Loneliness . « p.; . 


123 


VIII. 


The Greatness of Man Seen in Hu- 






man Progress t . : L .; ; .. « w 


143 


IX. 


The Exploits of Faith l .j w w .. 


161 


X. 


The Changed Form w m m w 


179 


XI. 


Utter Knowledge is Utter Love . 


197 


XII. 


The Pebsonal Factor in Religion . 


215 


XIII. 


The Power of Principle w m » . 


233 


XIV. 


Chambers of Imagery m m w m ( . 


253 


XV. 


The Reproach Of the Flower m fe 


271 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



I 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 

"Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in 
Me; or else believe Me for th« very works' sake." — John xiv. 
11. 

DO men believe in Christ? Do the young men of 
this generation believe in Christ? If they do 
not, is it because they have paid no attention to the 
subject, and regard it as of slight importance? 
These are some of the questions suggested by this 
pregnant saying of Christ, to which I invite your 
deliberate and reverent attention. 

Now beyond all doubt religion is by far the most 
important thing in human life. It is not merely a 
question of supreme interest who we are, what we 
are, and what is our destiny, but is a matter of su- 
preme practical importance, since the whole area of 
human conduct is ruled by man's conception of him- 
self, his duties, and his destiny. The evidence of 
this statement is found in universal history. Thus, 
for example, no state has ever risen to any position 
of great power and dominion except by the aid of 
religion, and the great struggles of mankind can 

13 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



almost always be traced to motives in themselves 
profoundly religious, or the offspring of religion. 
Perhaps the greatest empire the world has ever 
known was the Roman, and in the earlier stages of 
their history the Romans were not less religious than 
the Israelites. Horace was by no means a religious 
man, yet he was constrained to admit that Rome 
could not endure without religious convictions, and 
he warns his countrymen that all their sorrows spring 
from forgetfulness of God. Voltaire spoke in pre- 
cisely the same spirit when he said that if there were 
no God it would be necessary to invent a God, be- 
cause without belief in God the fabric of society 
could not be held together. So far as English do- 
mestic history is concerned, there has not been a 
single great struggle on English soil which has not 
been dominated by religious ideas, and the whole 
story of the national development expresses the 
enormous effect of religious ideas on practical con- 
duct. So then the first thing which we are con- 
strained to admit is the enormous importance of 
religion in personal and national life, and this is 
something which only the grossly ignorant or entirely 
foolish and thoughtless will think of doubting. 

It was one of the earliest sayings of Jesus Christ 
that the practical virtue of any system of faith lay in 
its effect on conduct, " by their fruits ye shall know 
them." It is this principle which He applies now to 
Himself and His teaching. He submits Himself to 

14 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 

the examination of practical men. He is well aware 
that in the long run even the best and greatest of 
men must be judged not by anything they have said 
or taught, but by what they have done. We all 
admit this principle and we practise it. When we 
sum up the career of a statesman, we may read his 
speeches with interest, but the main thing to which 
we pay attention is the nature of the measures he 
passed, and the total quality of his impact on the 
public life. When we read Buddha's teachings of 
brotherhood, we admit their charm, but we judge 
their real value by the fact that for four thousand 
years in India the lives of the rich and the poor 
have run in parallel lines, and have never once met. 
A man's ideas and teachings are at all times but the 
flower of the mind, or of the soul, if you will; the 
great question is, is there fruit as well as flower, 
and has the blossom slowly changed into the fruit 
that is for the healing of the nations? Jesus knows 
that that question must be asked, and He not merely 
submits to it, He challenges it. Standing in the sad 
gloom of the premature end, knowing that His dis- 
ciples will be tempted to think His life a failure, He 
now bids them, if they cannot believe in Him for His 
own sake, at least to believe in Him for His works' 
sake. Let them measure that work ; let them regard 
the significance of Christ in history; and then let 
them judge whether or not He is divine. And that 
is the challenge of Christ to us also. We see what 

15 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



His disciples did not see, we behold the expanding 
and miraculous phenomenon of Christianity through 
nearly twenty centuries — the significance of Christ 
in history, the supremacy that He has won over the 
souls and minds of men, the effect which belief in 
Him has had over all who have truly embraced it, 
and through them, over great tracts of time, wide 
fields of event, immense domains of thought, morals 
and conduct — we see this, and ask, " Could a mere 
man do this ? " Was not this the very God incarnate, 
God made manifest in Jesus, so that He who has 
wrought these wonders in the world might truly 
claim, " I am in the Father, and the Father in me ; 
I and the Father are one." 

For the sake of clearness in definition we may say, 
that the works of Christ are manifest in three direc- 
tions — the mind, the heart, and the conduct of men. 
His work upon the mind is seen in the intellectual 
ideals of men; on the heart, in their moral life; on 
the conduct, in their practical life. Let us put aside 
if you will, all questions of the person of Christ. Let 
us assume that all which we know is that many cen- 
turies ago there appeared in an obscure village of 
the obscurest country in the world, a young man, 
who for three years aroused considerable interest 
among His countrymen. By all accounts He had 
the genius to be loved, and to be hated; He made 
friends and He made enemies ; He disregarded the 
prejudices and conventions of society; He taught 

16 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



certain rules of life that were new and strange; He 
fell at last a victim to a jealous ecclesiastic oligarchy, 
was violently arrested, unjustly condemned, crucified, 
dead, and buried. His teachings survived Him, and 
by-and-bye the story of His life, as was perfectly 
natural, came to be told. These teachings, first im- 
pregnating the minds of a few humble men, spread 
with an unprecedented rapidity, and had the most 
singular and momentous effect upon the world. That 
is as much as we need to know for the purpose of 
our argument ; the question is what were those effects, 
and how do they dispose our minds to think of 
Christ? 

First, then, I ask you to think of the work of 
Christ in the realm of the intellect ; and let us further 
narrow the enquiry to the consideration of the reli- 
gious ideas with which He impregnated the human 
mind. 

Now if we go back to the date of Christ's birth, we 
find preserved for us by the diligence of the historian 
a vivid and accurate picture of the religious condition 
of the world. Three nations at once absorb our 
attention, the Jew, the Greek, and the Roman. All 
that was wisest in human philosophy and profoundest 
in human thought was preserved among these three 
peoples. It was to these peoples that Christianity 
especially, addressed itself. It was in Jerusalem, 
Corinth, Ephesus, and Rome that the earliest seed 
of Christianity was sown. What then was the re- 

17 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



ligious condition of these great peoples, what the 
conclusions of the intellect on religious subjects 
which they had reached and accepted? 

The answer may be given in a single sentence; in 
each case religion had totally broken down. 

For the Jew religion had become narrower and 
narrower until it was a mere piece of gorgeous and 
empty ritual. Its theory of the divine government 
of the universe had become incredible. Amid the 
millions of men and women in the world who vaguely 
felt after the secret of virtue, it would appear that 
God cared only for the Jew. To be a son of 
Abraham was to have an inalienable claim on heaven, 
and, according to the Pharisee's view of the case, 
quite apart from any righteousness of conduct. 
God was thus merely a tribal God, and the whole 
universe was administered in the special interest of 
the Jew. A great religion when it was enunciated 
on Sinai, a powerful religion when it gripped the 
mind and conscience of a fugitive race in their early 
struggles, a true religion when it was sincerely be- 
lieved ; it had now lost all its saving salt of sincerity, 
had become a fetish, and ministered less to human 
virtue than to human impiety, arrogance, and exclu- 
siveness. 

Among the Greeks also religion had totally broken 
down. The worship of mere physical beauty was 
universal, and when Socrates prayed that the Gods 
would give him " beauty of soul," he was not under- 

18 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



stood. The Gods themselves were the incarnation of 
human vices as well as virtues, for the Greek had 
his God of cunning, and his God of lying, as well as 
his Gods of music, chastity, and wisdom. 

And among the Romans the breakdown of religion 
was even more disastrous, and it took a form ab- 
solutely appalling. That form was the worship of 
Caesar as God. When Herod received the worship of 
the people as a God and not as a man; when Paul 
spoke of the " man of sin who sitteth in the temple 
of God shewing himself that he is God," Herod 
simply emulated the Caesars in claiming divine 
honours, and Paul directly refers to this impious 
worship of Caesar. To the reigning Caesar, temples 
were built, sacrifices were offered, and divine honours 
were paid. To us such an impiety seems incredible, 
especially among a people so robust in mind and 
masculine in temper as the Roman. But there was a 
reason for it. Faith in any external government of 
the universe had wholly failed. Madness and corrup- 
tion had seized upon every class of society. There 
was neither justice, virtue, nor morality left — all 
had been dissolved with a dissolving faith in a divine 
government. Then came Julius Caesar, and, by what 
is the greatest miracle of secular history, arrested 
the decay of society, imposed upon it a military 
despotism" which was at least just and powerful, 
combined its scattered forces, gave Rome a new 
lease of life, and established once more the supremacy 

19 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



of virtue. What wonder that Caesar was soon re- 
garded as more than mortal man? What wonder 
that the hope of mankind clung with frantic, and 
then with adoring passion to this new Saviour of 
society? Something man must worship, and the 
Gods being gone, soon man began to worship his 
fellow man as God. And this was the state of re- 
ligious thought when Christ came — the Jew wor- 
shipping before an empty shrine on which the flame 
of sincerity had died, the Greek delighting in a 
brutally corrupt mythology, the Roman worshipping 
Augustus Caesar as the one puissant and active deity 
in the world. 

And now consider the challenge of this text. This 
youth, growing up in a tiny Syrian town, where not 
only the Roman or the Greek but the leaders of His 
own nation never came, begins to speak certain 
words about God. The only conception of God left 
to the Jews is an exclusive tribal deity who cares only 
for the sons of Abraham; this youth speaks of the 
Father in heaven, who has an equal love of all men. 
The Greek looking with impure eyes into the mys- 
tery of things invents deities even more corrupt 
than man ; this youth says, " Blessed are the pure in 
heart for they shall see God." The Roman, bank- 
rupt in all faith in any divine power outside the 
earth, sacrifices to Caesar as the only power he 
knows ; this youth draws back the veil of the 
infinite, and reveals the ever-living Judge of quick 

20 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 

and dead, and says, " There is none good but one, 
that is God." You would have supposed that any 
words spoken by one so insignificant would have 
been wholly lost; it is natural to suppose so. What 
is there briefer in its influence than the spoken 
word; and this youth never wrote a single sentence, 
never did what the humblest prophet or philosopher 
did to perpetuate His message, never took the least 
precaution to preserve His teaching. Yet that teach- 
ing spread with miraculous rapidity. He Himself 
had said that His words were spirit and life, and so 
it proved. Whispered at first in the lowly places of 
the earth, spoken presently in the market places, 
temples and palaces ; prescribed as heresy, hated as 
blasphemy; these words spread and everywhere they 
struck the note of a new life. Into the deep black- 
ness of the pit where society lay and rotted there 
came a ray of light ; over the sterile waste of hu- 
man thought there blew the wind of life. At length 
the hour came when the old was utterly outworn; 
Home fell, and great was the fall of it; but in the 
same instant it was discovered that a new power 
had taken its place, and Christ filled the throne 
which Caesar had abdicated. The dust of conflict 
cleared away, and behold the Cross shone upon the 
Capitol. The thoughts of Christ about God became 
the supreme truths on which men based all their 
hopes and aspirations. The Fatherhood of God — a 
true sovereignty of intelligence, law, and love — be- 

21 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



came the keystone of human thought, and a new 
world sprang out of the ruins of the old. All that 
as the fruit of a brief life lived in Galilee, and of 
certain words spoken among its quiet hills ; all that 
as the work of one who had but three years in which 
to influence the world, and was rejected by the world 
with every circumstance of ignominy and shame! 
Have you considered what it means? Have you 
given one single thoughtful hour to what is the 
greatest phenomenon in human history? Can you, 
with this phenomenon before you, resist the force 
of the divine appeal, " Believe me, that I am in the 
Father, and the Father in me; or else believe me for 
the very works' sake ? " 

Let a second picture pass before the mind, and 
consider the work of Christ upon the human heart. 
The heart stands for morality; for the way in which 
men feel toward one another, and the way in which 
they treat one another. 

And here three facts may be stated as indicative of 
the moral condition of the world when Christ entered 
it. The first is that the ancient world had no con- 
ception of the rights of human liberty. The great 
mass of men in the Roman empire were slaves, and 
when Plato sketched his ideal republic, it never 
occurred to him that society could exist without 
slavery. The great edifices of the ancient world 
which yet remain, on whose spoliated splendour we 
look with wonder, were all built by slave labour. 



THE DIVINE 



CHALLENGE 



There is no truism in modern philosophy more worn 
and trite than the dignity of labour, the 44 perennial 
nobleness of honest toil," as Carlyle called it ; we 
sometimes forget that this is an ethic of very modern 
date. Labour for the Roman was a thing both con- 
temptible and shameful. Society had but two classes, 
the free citizen and the slave. An immense gulf 
separated them; on one side of the gulf, life moved 
in stateliness and ease, a sensual and sumptuous 
pageant; on the other, life toiled obscurely in igno- 
rance and drudgery, knowing no rights, and incapable 
of striving for them. So again, the ancient world 
knew nothing of morality in our sense of the term. 
One of the chief Pauline doctrines is that society is 
an organism ; that it is knit together by a thousand 
delicate nerves ; that our good actions and our bad 
involve others in our weal and woe, and that there is 
no man who liveth to himself. But to the wisest of 
Pagan philosophers such words meant nothing. 
Seneca, one of the clearest of ancient thinkers, made 
no scruple of advising Nero to give the rein to his 
passions, and it never occurred to the philosopher that 
the pleasures of Nero involved the misery and dis- 
honour of his victims. That would be our first 
thought in considering any question of morality, but 
it was a thought of which the ancient world had 
never heard. 

It does not surprise us therefore to find further 
that the ancient world knew no pity for weakness or 

23 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



misfortune. The reign of might, and the right of 
might were things unquestioned. If a man chose 
to torture his slave or even slay his child, it was his 
own affair. To be weak or poor, was not only to be 
miserable, but deservedly miserable. Life had little 
value, and of the eighty thousand people who filled 
the Colosseum, and watched the dying gladiator, 
" butchered to make a Roman holiday," not one ever 
thought of pitying him. Nor was even the Jew 
much better than the Roman in his attitude to mis- 
fortune and weakness. The blind man doubtless de- 
served his blindness, or he would not be blind; suffer- 
ing was the wrath of heaven ; and the one convincing 
proof of the favour of God was a visible prosperity; 
and thus, put in a slightly different way, for the 
Jew also, as for the Roman, might was the only 
right. 

Once more look then at this supreme phenomenon 
of history, the work of Christ upon the human heart. 
This youth comes down from the hill- village of 
Nazareth, moves among all classes of society, and 
treats them as having equal rights. He announces 
the golden axiom that as we would that men shall do 
to us, even so should we do to them, and He practises 
it. He goes about doing good, healing, comforting, 
feeding the hungry, visiting the sick, succouring the 
dying pariahs and wastrels of society ; He earns the 
splendid reproach that He is the friend of publicans 
and sinners. He utters parable after parable, the 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



aim of which is to teach kindliness and love ; applauds 
the good Samaritan ; rebukes Dives, pities Lazarus ; 
pictures the Judgment-seat of God as the solemn 
tribunal where men are judged for their love of one 
another, or their lovelessness ; Himself dies forgiving 
His enemies, and breathing benediction on a thief 
who perishes with Him. At the time, perhaps, not 
even His disciples comprehended the significance of 
these words and actions; but they were not for- 
gotten. After a while they emerged into dazzling 
distinctness, and attracted the attention of the world. 
Men meditated over them, talked of them one to 
another, and at last strove to live in the same spirit. 
A company of men and women arose whose avowed 
object was to live as this youth lived, and they began 
to overspread the world. And so the Church of 
Christ begins — a confederacy of men and women 
who love Him, love one another, and love all men; 
the religion of humanity begins ; pity, tenderness, and 
consideration soften the human heart; slavery dies 
out, gladiatorial combats cease; wealth is shared, 
poverty is cheerfully endured, labour becomes honour- 
able, and the keynote of a new morality is struck, 
that it is more blessed to give than to receive — to 
minister than to be ministered unto. All this as the 
fruit of a single brief life lived long ago in Palestine. 
All our liberties, rights, humanities, moralities as the 
direct result of a life that perished on the Cross! 
How will you judge that life? What can you make 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



of a story so splendid and so nearly incredible? 
Forget if you please all that theology has to say 
about this wondrous youth of Nazareth; regard it 
as unthinkable if you must; still the works remain, 
and the divine challenge reaches us, " Believe me that 
I am in the Father, and the Father in me: or else 
believe me for the very works' sake." 

And so you have the last picture of the work of 
Christ on the practical conduct of men — and here 
we have no need to confine our thoughts to the 
ancient world, for the work of Christ is seen all 
around us in the characteristics of our own time. 

Far away yonder in the Southern seas lies a country 
that we call Fiji. Sixty years ago it was barbarous 
and cannibal. To that dark land of blood and the 
shadow of death Christian Missionaries went. They 
toiled, they suffered, they died, and some of them 
were murdered. Others took their places, and these 
also in their turn suffered and died. They were men 
of no genius, but they had a story to tell, and they 
told it. They spoke unceasingly of Christ, of His 
love, His pity, and His death ; and they themselves 
lived as those with whom love was the master-word 
of life. To-day Fiji is Christian. Cannibalism is no 
more, virtue and truth are loved, brotherhood reigns, 
and the lips that once drank the blood of the slain, 
drink the cup of the Communion of .Christ the Lord. 

26 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



You need not go back to the days of the Roman 
empire to discover what Christ has done for hu- 
manity; nothing in the past is more wonderful than 
this present-day story of Fiji; and Christ says, " If 
ye believe me not for my words' sake, believe me for 
Fiji's sake." 

In the history of the world from time to time men 
arise who exercise a vast redemptive influence upon 
their times — the Wesleys, the Moffats, the Living- 
stones. They discard wealth, reject ease, scorn 
fame; they are found preaching to the brutal mobs 
who stone them, living among the lowest of the race, 
loving them, and dying for them. They have left us 
in no doubt as to the secret of their lives ; they tell 
us that the love of Christ constrained them. Christ 
may be to you a dim historic figure, but He was not 
so to them ; to them He was a real and living Master, 
whose presence they felt, whose word they obeyed, 
whose spirit was reincarnated in them; and from 
their lives the challenge rings, " If ye believe not my 
words, and find in my Gospel nothing that moves or 
interests you, then believe me for Wesley's sake, for 
Moffat's sake, for Livingstone's sake." 

Round about us rise a series of institutions of 
which the world in former times never so much as 
dreamed. We have our hospitals, our orphanages, 
our asylums for every species of human misery. We 

27 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



have a vast array of public buildings called churches, 
and there is not one of them which is not a centre 
of philanthropic effort to befriend the weak, to help 
the poor, to succour the sorrowful. There is not a 
hospital in the land that was not built by the hands 
of this youth of Nazareth. There is not an asylum 
for indigence and misery that does not owe itself to 
Calvary. Abolish Christianity, and in a single gen- 
eration all would be swept away, for it is by the 
munificence of Christians, and them alone, that such 
hospices of mercy exist. We may find the theology 
of the Churches hard to be understood, and we may 
have no taste for the casuistries of the theologians; 
Christ bids us turn from them if we must, and ad- 
dresses us in other words : " If ye believe not Me 
for my words' sake, believe me for the sake of the 
hospital and the orphanage, for the sake of the pity 
men have learned of Me, and of the love which I 
have taught them." 

It is a common error to treat Christianity as if it 
were a disputable philosophy ; it is not a philosophy, 
it is a practical fact, and a vital force. Do not think 
that you have done with Christianity when you have 
found some glaring fault in its professors, or some 
illogical passage in the statements of its advocates. 
Christianity is the greatest phenomenon in history, 
and its proof is its works. If you have paid no at- 
tention to that phenomenon it is no credit to your 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



intelligence. You give eager attention enough to a 
thousand other things that are of the very slightest 
importance, to the pleasures of life, to what is called 
success in life, to the theories of this or that popular 
teacher, to political or social programmes that will be 
forgotten in a year — to sport, to amusement, to 
athletics, to the ephemeral trivialities of a passing 
literature — but what think ye of Christ ? Have you 
ever considered that question? Have you ever given 
one single hour of earnest and continuous thought to 
the phenomenon of Jesus? Have you ever realised 
that all you have and are is bound up in that ques- 
tion? Have you ever realised, in a word, that the 
question of religion is the one supreme question, and 
that until man has found the answer to it he disquiets 
himself in vain, and walketh in a vain show? That 
is the conclusion I would press home upon you. Go 
home, and face the question, " What do I think of 
Christ, what has Christ done for me, what claim has 
He upon me? " Go out into the world of business 
to-morrow and remember that it is Christ's world you 
live in, and that you are not your own, you are 
bought with a price. Go from this church, and in 
the quiet of your own heart, clear and insistent above 
all other questions that agitate you, hear this divine, 
this cogent, this pathetic challenge, " Believe me that 
I am in -the Father, and the Father in Me; or else 
Believe Me for the very works' sake." 

29 



THE LAMP AND THE DAY STAR 



II 



THE LAMP AND THE DAY STAR 

" And we have the word of prophecy made more sure ; where- 
unto ye do well to take heed, as unto a lamp shining in a dark 
place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your 
heart."— 2 Peter i. 19. 

NOTHING is more striking from the point of 
view of psychology than the enormous effect 
which Jesus had on the minds of His immediate fol- 
lowers. Even were we disposed to doubt the truth 
of the historic resurrection of Jesus, we should find 
it impossible to deny that He rose again in a very 
real sense in the lives of His apostles. The thoughts 
they think are His thoughts: the hopes and emotions 
they feel are His hopes and emotions: and we know 
that these thoughts, hopes and emotions are totally 
different from those they once cherished, and are 
even diametrically opposed to them. When St. Paul 
says, " I live yet not I but Christ liveth in me," he 
proclaims this phenomenon — a phenomenon so start- 
ling and profound that it stands alone in the history 
of the human mind. Moreover, St. Paul is at pains 
to tell us that for a considerable period of his life 
Jesus was nothing to him, and that there was not 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



a thought in his heart that was not opposed to Him. 
And what was true of Paul was true of all the 
apostles. They each represent a new incarnation of 
Jesus. In each the soul of Jesus has been re-born: 
born again in the heart by faith, is the apostle's 
phrase. Thus we find the whole mind of Peter pen- 
etrated with the sense of Jesus. The Galilean fish- 
erman is extinct; Jesus lives in him the hope of glory. 
One sublime image is in all his thoughts, colours all 
his writings, pervades all his emotions — and that is 
the image of his Lord. Past, present, and future 
are all focussed in Jesus, and so in this passage when 
he surveys the history of things past and the course 
of things to come, he perceives all alike in the light 
of Him who is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning 
and the end, and the bright and morning star of Hope 
and Truth. 

Notice the imagery of this passage. It is very 
beautiful and poetic — a series of pictures full of 
significance and charm. You have first a picture of 
the world and of the human heart, as a dark place: 
literally a squalid place, and by this term the Greek 
meant a place without light and without water. It 
is a region of pain and dissatisfaction: a wilder- 
ness, a barbarous place, a land of darkness and the 
shadow of death. But it is not wholly dark: even in 
this land of gloom men move with lamps, searching 
for a practicable way that is firm and safe. These 
men are the prophets, the guides, . and shepherds of 



THE LAMP AND THE DAY STAR 



humanity. The lamp they carry is a light unto the 
feet — light sufficient for the next step of duty, but 
it casts no extended ray, and paints the curtain of 
impenetrable darkness with a glimmering splendour 
only. Yet it is much to have any light in a pitch- 
black night, and these light-bearers lead the host of 
humanity on many a crooked path, as a peasant with 
a lamp may guide the traveller through the defiles of 
a mountain range. Perhaps the very image in the 
mind of Peter is a scene often witnessed by him in 
the old Galilean days — the shepherd on the hills 
whose lamp burns all night beside the sleeping flocks ; 
a lamp of hope in the dark waste and emptiness of 
night. 

But now he sees another thing also ; the dawn 
begins to break. The shepherd's lamp burns dim, 
fades to a tiny spark, and is extinguished in the 
widening light. Over the wide glimmering hills a 
star hangs, and the heavens grow lucid round it, for 
it is the morning star. The clouds melt into a veil 
of gossamer: one by one the lamps are put out, for 
the long vigil is over, and the day is here. Even 
so, says Peter, God gave the lamps of prophecy in 
the world's great night. Through long ages the 
prophets, those lonely lamp-bearers, lighting the 
world's advance, did their duty: until at last the 
morning .star of Christ appeared, the day of God 
broke over Bethlehem and Calvary, and the light of 
the world had come. 

35 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



The Lamp and the Day Star. — Let us take an- 
other illustration, which lies perhaps within the 
experience of some of you. Suppose we were set- 
ting out to climb some lonely Alpine peak, what 
would be the method of our advance ? The first part 
of the journey would begin soon after midnight. 
Those who watched us as we went would see a string 
of lights moving up the mountain side, and by these 
glimmering human stars we should find our way 
through the thick pine forest, up the steep moraine, 
across the glacier. Above us there would rise a dome 
of sky dark as velvet, and far away the white ice 
peaks would stand like ghostly sentinels, each hooded 
in his snows, silent, dreadful, immutable. But at 
three or four o'clock, as we gained some wide plateau 
of snow, a halt would be called. Through the silent 
air a sigh of life would rise: far away the topmost 
peak would grow whiter; round us the outlines of 
ice and rock would emerge into distinctness, and then 
the guides would extinguish the lamps one by one. 
Why? Because their use was ended: the summer 
dawn is near, and already on the peaks the rose of 
day begins to burn. This is precisely the contrast 
which is suggested in this poetic phrase of Peter's. 
Lamps and the morning star — lamps and the sun: 
for the people that sat in darkness have seen a great 
light. Uncertainty is exchanged for certainty: the 
perilous path, half -discerned, for the safe and prac- 
ticable way: the guesses of Philosophy for the per- 

36 



THE LAMP AND THE DAY STAR 



feet day of Truth. The day is come, for Christ 
has come: put out thy lamp, O shepherd of the hills, 
and thou, also, solitary climber after truth, for the 
day star arises in thine heart, and 

Out of the shadow of night 
The world rolls into light, 
It is daybreak everywhere. 

The Lamp and the Day Star — each may stand 
as a symbol of hope — the contrast suggested is a 
contrast of degree. Human hopes take two forms: 
the individual and the collective. Something in the 
human heart makes man hope for himself — bids him 
know he was not made to die, bids him seek a brighter 
destiny than that which seems included in, or indicated 
by, his earthly lot. And from that personal hope 
he passes naturally to that collective hope which is 
the spirit of human progress. Unlike every other 
creature of this earth, man does not take his lot as 
he finds it. He is continually seeking to modify and 
improve it. He is always experimenting in the art 
of living. To-day he is a tent-dweller, to-morrow 
the builder of cities. He interrogates earth and air, 
sea and sky, for their secrets: finds them, uses them 
and shapes them to his own demands. He invents 
schemes of government, codes of law, maxims of con- 
duct. Century by century he debates about these 
things, clears and sifts his thoughts, and extends 
their range. And in all this he is inspired by a be- 

37. 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



lief in Society ; he sees it as an organism that grows, 
and may be helped in its growth, until at last some- 
thing perfect shall be found, and the desert shall 
bloom and blossom as the rose. So man has thought 
and acted from the beginning, because as each man 
enters the world an angel puts into his hand a lamp, 
sets him on an upward path, and bids him hope. 

Turn then to the times before Christ, and ask, 
what about these hopes? What had they done for 
man, and to what point had he attained? The 
highest individual hope is found in the Hebrew Scrip- 
tures. Were all revealed religion finally proclaimed 
incredible, we should still owe a debt to the Jew which 
is incalculable. For the Jew, taught by his own po- 
litical experience that from a minute and despised 
germ of life a great nation might be evolved; taught 
by his own spiritual experience that virtue and right- 
eousness are the sole abiding realities ; taught by his 
own intellectual experience that truth might be won 
and kept, and become the living soul of nations — 
the Jew has accomplished this imperishable, this im- 
measurable service to humanity — he has bid it hope. 
Into the darkness and mystery of the world he has 
penetrated with a bolder step than all his fellows, 
and he has borne aloft a brighter lamp. But when 
we begin to measure the circumference of splendour 
cast by that lamp, we perceive at once that it did 
not go very far. On some problems where light was 
most desired, it shed but a feeble and fluctuating ray. 

38 



THE LAMP AND THE DAY STAR 



Thus for example the Hebrew Scriptures as a whole 
say little of personal immortality. If you turn to 
the words of Hezekiah — one of the wisest and most 
pious of Jewish kings, when he is suddenly brought 
face to face with the unknown beyond death — you 
will find that that unknown holds nothing for him. 
He clings vehemently to life and gives his reason 
thus : " The grave cannot praise Thee, death can- 
not celebrate Thee: they that go down into the pit 
cannot hope for thy truth." The words of Job, in 
spite of occasional and brief harp-notes of triumph, 
ring with the same accent of entire mournf ulness : 
death is for him the place of darkness, the house 
of dust where the very stones are darkness, and of 
which the best that can be said is that there the 
wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at 
rest. There is little to choose between such passages 
as these and that great Assyrian hymn of death, 
called the Descent of Istar into Hades, which pictures 
the abode of the dead as 

The house of darkness 
The house men enter but cannot depart from, 
The road men go but cannot return, 
The house from whose dwellers the light is withdrawn 
The place where dust is their food, their nourishment 
clay. 

The light they behold not: in darkness they dwell, 
They are clothed like birds, all fluttering wings, 
On the door and the gate posts the dust lies thick, 

3d 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



And so without turning to many a passage in the 
Psalms and to the dreary words of Solomon, with 
their unutterable despair, we see that the hopefulness 
of the Hebrew was far more circumscribed than we 
supposed. It was a lamp, not the day star, not the 
day ; it lit the path of earthly duty with a perfect 
light, but it cast barely a ray into the impenetrable 
darkness of the shadow of death and that which lay 
beyond it. 

The same thing may be said, though with some 
modification, about the social hopes of the Hebrew. 
The lamp burned bright and unextinguished for many 
an age, for of all things the surest thing to the Jew 
was that it is righteousness which ennobles a nation. 
He saw the vision of a perfect society — a society 
God-governed, God-worshipping — the perfect vehi- 
cle of the divine will, the concrete expression of the 
divine mind. But what he also found to be true at 
every point of his history was that he was not effi- 
cient to create and maintain such a society. He was 
like the artist who has the genius to prepare the 
scheme of a great picture, but has not the power 
to complete it. Thus we have only to turn to our 
Gospels to discover that Jewish society as Christ 
found it was hollow to the core. It was, as He said, 
in an image at once startling and dreadful, a whited 
sepulchre, full of dead men's bones and all unclean- 
ness. Religious and moral progress had come to a 
standstill. The priesthood was powerful and impos- 

40 



THE LAMP AND THE DAY STAR 



ing but corrupt : the leaders of the nation learned in 
the pedantry of learning, but insincere in belief, im- 
moral in conduct, and hypocrites in temper and prac- 
tice. The lamp had shown the way, but had not led 
men to the height : and as the ages passed it had ever 
burned dimmer, till the way itself grew indistinct. It 
was a lamp whose light was dying in the socket — 
not a day star, not the pure unvanquishable dawn; 
the light of a lamp upon the vast interminable ice- 
slopes of human duty. 

And if we pass beyond the Jew to that great Pagan 
world which surrounded him, we find things im- 
measurably worse. Both the Greek and the Roman 
had given up hope of any spiritual destiny beyond 
death. As for society it had reached its climax — it 
stood still. Here and there a philosopher still talked 
nobly of his ideal republic, as Plato did; but none 
listened, and none cared to listen. For, of this great 
Pagan world, ruled by the splendid but monotonous 
Roman order, it was emphatically true that the whole 
scheme of society seemed fixed and immutable. If 
change came at all it would be change for the worse : 
and indeed already much had changed for the worse, 
for the old simple religious beliefs, the primitive man- 
liness and virtue of the Roman were as stars extin- 
guished in the gathering night of a general deprav- 
ity. If men looked forward it was not with hope; 
it was to cry 



41 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



Here is the moral of all human tales, 
'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past, 
First freedom and then glory; when that fails, 
Wealth, vice, corruption — barbarism at last. 

So far the lamps of human wisdom had led men, 
but no further, and the place in which it now shone 
was a dark place indeed, for hope scarcely illumined 
it at all, and in it the waters of peace and life were 
not found. 

And now listen to the sublime and inspired speech 
of Peter: a lamp shining in a dark place, until the 
day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts. Do 
not the words lead us back at once to those green 
pastures where shepherds watched their flocks by 
night and suddenly heard a great company of the 
heavenly host proclaiming peace and good will to 
man? Is he not thinking of the Star which arose in 
the East, and stood still over the manger-cradle 
where the young child lay ? Are not these shepherds, 
and these wise men whose lamps hang extinguished 
because the glory of the Lord shone around them, 
types of the world's sages and prophets whose lamps 
of wisdom paled their ineffectual ray, because at last 
the day star rises, and the morning breaks? For 
this and no other was precisely what did happen with 
the coming of Christ. He came as the Light of the 
world, bringing with Him all the fresh hope and 
splendour of the morning. For man the individual, 
immeasurable hope — the shadow of death gone, and 

42 



THE LAMP AND THE DAY STAR 

life and immortality brought to light by the Gospel. 
For man collectively, that is for society, immeasur- 
able hope also: the old order changed and giving 
place to new, and the spirit of progress once more 
passing over the dark void, and quickening it. Man 
rises up and sees the peaks of God afar, the immortal 
summits long hidden in the night, or visible only like 
vague shadows in the gloom, and presses on to a 
destiny such as eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor 
the heart of man conceived. Society long stagnant, 
fixed and immutable, begins to move also, and the 
spirit of progress is abroad. The Roman order gives 
place to a diviner order, the empire of the Caesars 
to the Kingdom of God, the religion of force and 
terror to the religion of humanity. It was not only 
Christ who was born in Bethlehem — the world itself 
was born anew there. All history ranks itself, not 
by the caprice of the ecclesiastic, but by force of 
natural affinity, into that which came before Christ, 
and that which happened after. The most sceptical 
of historians must needs admit the classification: 
whatever happened in Bethlehem, this he knows, that 
a force was born there that transformed the world. 
That force was the Birth of Light; the lamps that 
lit the night are gone, the prophets' toil and the 
shepherds' vigil are fulfilled. The Day star has 
risen, and behind it comes the Day streaming into 
the dark heart of man, illumining the way of Truth, 
glittering on the far off pinnacles of the city of God, 

48 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



filling even the pathways of the tomb with an im- 
mortal sunshine — the Day has come, for Christ has 
come. 

Lamps and the Morning Star. — Such a contrast 
further teaches us how we should regard the ancient 
religions of the world. There was a time not far 
removed when Christian men refused to hear a good 
word for any other religion than Christianity because 
they imagined that it was necessary to minify and 
even defame every other system of religious thought 
in order to magnify Christianity. That was not the 
spirit of Christ : He came not to destroy but to fulfil 
all the broken hints of truth and goodness in all the 
long course of human thought and conduct. These 
ancient religions were the lamps lit by the human 
soul in a dark place. Light is always light, and the 
feeblest light is really lit at the sun, which is the 
source of all light. And a spark of the true light 
shone in the soul of Confucius when five hundred 
years before Christ, he formulated his golden rule, 
" What you do not wish done to yourself, do not do 
to others." It shone in Zoroaster, it shone in Socra- 
tes, it shone conspicuously in Buddha. All honour 
to the lamp bearers of humanity, by whatever name 
they were called. All honour to the men of spiritual 
genius, who in every age held aloft the torch of 
truth, and, dying, passed it on, so that the world 
should not stumble and wholly fall in the dense gloom 
of ignorance and folly. But they were lamp bearers 

44 



THE LAMP AND THE DAY STAR 



only. They illumined one little section of human 
thought — one brief step upon the way ; when the 
Day comes all is illumined. And as the day literally 
fulfils the broken gleams of starry fire that pierced 
the night, so Christ fulfils all that Confucius and 
Buddha taught, all that Socrates and Zoroaster 
hoped. The lamp is quenched because the morning 
grows. And when we take Christ to the great na- 
tions of the East, it is not in a spirit of contempt 
for the only religion they know; it is rather with 
thankfulness to God that they have any religion, and 
that God hath not left Himself without a witness in 
their hearts ; and when we preach Christ under the 
shadow of Chinese pagodas and Indian temples, it 
is only that we may change the lamps of Confucius 
and Buddha for the brightness of the morning star; 
for Christ is the desire of all nations, and these great 
creators of religious thought in a hundred nations 
kept vigil till He appeared, were His unconscious 
light bearers, and were as those who watched for 
the coming of the morning, even of the perfect day 
of Him who is the Light of life. 

Lamps and the Morning Star. — Perhaps some of 
you will say, But after all is not this exquisite story 
of the birth of Jesus mere legend ; may it not also 
be pure myth? Let us concede that it is both myth 
and legend if you will, as Mr. Grant Allen contends 
in his latest and most serious contribution to litera- 
ture, but even then, there are two indisputable and 

45 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



obstinate truths to be resolved; one is that something 
happened, and that that something changed the 
world ; the other is that mere myths do not change 
the world. It is this very accusation of the mythical 
character of Christianity which Peter answers in his 
Epistle, when he says he has not followed cunningly 
devised fables, for he was an eye witness of the 
majesty of Christ and had had every opportunity 
which the most incredulous could desire of learning 
the truth at the fountain head. And again, he him- 
self, a changed man, moving among changed men, 
with a Christian church growing up around him 
which is already beginning to profoundly influence 
the Roman empire, is a witness that something hap- 
pened and is happening. Jesus for him was no myth, 
he had sat with Him at the last supper, he had seen 
Him die upon the cross. His birth was no legend; 
he had known those who had watched His childhood, 
and had pondered in their hearts the story of Beth- 
lehem. It was not a myth which was finding its way 
into every corner of the empire and had its converts 
in Caesar's household also; it was rather the light of 
a great reality, a supreme revelation. He stood 
amid the dying lamps of the ancient world, as one 
may stand in a great city when the night departs, 
and he saw the Day grow round him. He could not 
be mistaken: and if he could, we cannot; for from 
the moment that the star rested over Bethlehem, the 

46 



THE LAMP AND THE DAY ST Alt 



whole world has grown brighter. And to that world 
that was, that dark hard world where 

Weariness and sated lust 
Made human life a hell, 

— that midnight world, with its faint and scattered 
lamps of truth, we are not likely to go back, even 
upon the invitation of Mr. Grant Allen. We have 
seen the Day: let those prefer the night who will. 
We have exchanged the lamp for the morning star — 
we are not likely to repent our choice. Light of 
Hope and Light of Truth, still grow brighter, is our 
cry: Thy Kingdom come: and to those who see it 
not, those who are blind amid the blaze of noon, those 
who still grope at the altars of a dead paganism, and 
stumble on the tombs of a long-buried philosophy, 
we can but utter the great apostolic appeal, " Awake, 
thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ 
shall give thee light." 

And so the words of Peter take us back to Beth- 
lehem. Dark lies the Jewish plain, dark rise the 
Syrian hills, hushed lie the pastures and the sheep; 
and on these hills, invisible, stand men of majestic 
presence, the great spirits of the past — Moses, Sam- 
uel, David, Isaiah, and that Elijah who was a burn- 
ing and a shining light — they stand and wait. 
" Watchman what of the night ? " But no voice 
answers from the sleeping pastures, and the world 

Art 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



lies dumb. " Watchman what of the night ? Our 
lamps go out, and something tells us that our long 
vigil is nearly done." But none replies : the heavens 
are very still, and up the road to the little town of 
Bethlehem, climb two weary pilgrims for whom there 
is no room in the inn. " Watchman what of the 
night? 99 And now behold the fugitives have reached 
their humble shelter, and a child's voice floats out 
upon the frosty air, and a whisper runs across the 
world — " The night is departing." Lonely watch- 
ers, majestic prophets of the truth, depart ye also to 
your rest — the world is safe, for God hath entered 
it. He enters it in the garb of a little child. He 
enters it — and light enters with Him: for suddenly 
a great glory floods the earth, and a multitude of the 
heavenly host sing 

Glory to God in the highest 

And on earth peace, good will among men. 

So is Christ born in Bethlehem of Judea, and from 
land to land there flies the news, " The night is gone, 
the long expected Day has come." 



48 



THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD 



\ 



Ill 



THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD 

" When He giveth quietness who then can make trouble, and 
when He hideth His face who then can behold Him?" — Job. 
xxxiv. Q9. 

THE Book of Job deals in dramatic form with 
the most solemn of all problems, the Mystery 
of Human suffering. It is the greatest dramatic 
poem in the world, and in all the centuries which 
have elapsed since its production, human thought 
never soared higher, nor plumbed deeper into the 
mystery of things. It does not pretend wholly to 
solve the problem of suffering, but it advances five 
theories, 1 each one of which is eagerly debated, and 
all of which are finally swallowed up in the glory of 
the Divine intervention. The first theory is that 
suffering is the test of saintship, and that by the 
endurance of suffering, human nature arrives at 
saintship — a theory which Job himself favours, 
when he finally says, " He knoweth the way that I 
take; when He hath tried me, I shall come forth as 
gold." The second theory is: that all suffering is 

iThe analysis is borrowed from Professor Moulton's mas- 
terly introduction on the Book of Job. 

51 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



in some way a judgment upon sin, a theory which 
Job indignantly repudiates, because he is unable to 
accuse himself of any wrong-doing, which could 
justly merit punishment so monstrous. A third the- 
ory is that suffering is sent to call men to repentance, 
and is thus a mercy since by repentance man may 
avert total destruction — a theory to which Job 
shows himself entirely indifferent. A fourth theory 
is that the whole universe is full of mystery, and the 
mystery of evil is not greater than the mystery of 
good — a theory hinted at in this passage of the 
drama, " God hides His face, who then can behold 
Him " : i. e., who can pretend to read the reasons why 
God performs any act whatever? A fifth theory is 
that the right attitude toward mystery is entire faith, 
and that mystery is thus necessary to the growth of 
faith, and is as the dews of Eden that keep the 
garden of the soul fresh — a theory which finds 
ample illustration in the way in which Job endures 
his trial. Thus the thoughts of men circle round 
the problem of suffering, and the ages have not 
changed these thoughts. Job is still afflicted in a 
thousand homes: Job's comforters still appear in a 
thousand schemes of philosophy and religion: and 
the endless drama still enacts itself on a stage where 
mournful trumpets blow, and tears fall, and the som- 
bre pageant of sorrow unfolds itself before those 
who are the witnesses of pain to-day, and may be its 
victims to-morrow. 

52 



THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD 



But you will observe that toward one point all 
these conflicting theories converge, and that is the 
truth of the absolute sovereignty of God. The one 
thing that is doubted by no one in the drama, is that 
God reigns. The Potter may or may not act un- 
justly by His clay, but none can deny His right. If 
it be God's will to afflict Job, who shall say Him na}^? 
This is of course one of the oldest, as it is one of 
the saddest, thoughts in the world. You catch its 
echo in some of the more despairing utterances of the 
Hebrew prophets, and particularly in Jeremiah's 
great parable of the Potter and the Wheel. You 
have it distinctly stated in the poetry of the Persian 
Omar, who flourished in the first quarter of our 
Twelfth century — when he cries that we are all 

But helpless Pieces of the game He plays, 
Upon this chequer-board of nights and days: 
Hither and thither moves, and checks and slays, 
And one by one back in the closet lays. 

You have it stated afresh with infinite bitterness in 
the concluding words of Hardy's " Tess " — " Jus- 
tice was done: and the President of the Immortals 
had ended His sport with Tess." And Hardy him- 
self in using the phrase sends us back to the old 
Greek dramatists, all of whom felt a terror of the 
Gods, and felt themselves impotent before their wrath 
and their injustice. The absolute sovereignty of 
God, the indeterminable power of the Creator over 

53 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



His creatures, His perfect right to do as He will 
with man, regardless either of the merit or demerit 
of the individual — this is, as I have said, one of 
the oldest as it is one of the saddest thoughts of the 
world, and has filled the human heart with terror and 
misgiving. 

But you will observe at once that this thought is 
very far from producing in Elihu either sadness or 
incurable despair. Elihu is the youngest of the 
speakers in the drama, and he speaks with all the 
confidence of youth, with all its optimism, with all 
its sense of having obtained a new knowledge denied 
to the elders. How far his wisdom surpassed theirs 
it is not for us now to discuss, but it will be seen at 
once that he uses this tremendous truth of the ab- 
solute sovereignty of God in a new way, and draws 
from it not the lessons of despair but of hope. It 
affects him in two ways. He first states the absolute 
apportionment of good in men's lives — " When He 
giveth quietness, who then can make trouble?" 
Whatever we may or may not know of God, we do 
know that He gives good gifts to men — that He gives 
some good gift to every man, and from that we may 
argue that in the main His government of the world 
is not cruel or unjust. The second thing he states is 
the concealment of the Highest Good, which is the 
vision of God, the perfect knowledge of His ways — 
" When God hideth His face, who then can behold 
Him?" In all lives, and even in those which we 



THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD 



may variously call the happiest or the most fortunate, 
there is something hidden, something withdrawn, a 
door of mystery which no key of earth can unlock. 
There is the hidden face of God, hidden from us, as 
it was from His own Son, when He cried in the lonely 
darkness of the cross, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthcmi. 
There are things that happen to us for which no 
explanation is vouchsafed, and for which none seems 
possible. In the journey of life we all find ourselves 
at some time or other confronted by the Sphinx of 
the desert, the inscrutable face with sightless eyes 
that stare right on, and the lips that utter nothing, 
and we hear the wind of the desert, and the prophets 
of the wind, who cry 

Hushed in the infinite dark at the end ye shall be 
Restless feverish souls that travail and yearn; 
Lo, we have lifted the Veil — there is nothing to see ; 
Loj we have looked on the Scroll — there was nothing 
to learn. 

Elihu does not accept this despairing verdict, but he 
does argue that no perfect solution of the universe 
is possible, that mystery is necessary in the education 
of man, and that man was never meant to know, at 
least while upon the earth, the full explanation of 
God's ways, which are past finding out. And this 
leads him to a third thought which is implied rather 
than expressed, viz., the wisdom and joy of a com- 
plete surrender to God. " What is man that thou 

55 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



takest account of him," said the Hebrew Psalmist — 
for God does take account of man, and man is there- 
fore safe with God. " I can look on terrible things 
with a steadier eye," says one of our modern proph- 
ets, 44 knowing as I do, that the world is not left to 
itself, but has a King who is its Redeemer." And to 
this truth Job himself assents when he says, 44 Though 
he slay me, yet will I trust in him " ; he had then 
44 reached his climax," he had found the quietness 
which God gives in the midst of trouble, and, while 
he dwelt in that refuge, no arrows of outrageous 
fortune had power to wound him. So then we see 
that the indisputable sovereignty of God is capable 
of being stated in a way very different from that 
of Omar, or Euripides, or Thomas Hardy. It makes 
not for despair, but for the peace that passeth all 
understanding. It lifts man out of the transient, and 
gives him safe anchorage in the eternal. It makes 
him say with one of the great and true poets of our 
time — 

It fortifies my soul to know 
That tho' I perish, Truth is so: 
That howso'er I stray or range, 
Whate'er I do, Thou dost not change, 
I steadier step when I recall, 
That, if I slip, Thou dost not fall. 

In all lives there is the hidden thing which is signified 
in the darkened face of God, in all lives also there 
may be the divine quietness of faith ;' and it is on the 

56 



THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD 



truth of the Divine sovereignty that man bases all 
his faith, and enduring to the end is saved. 

And now let us turn from the statement and dis- 
cussion of these thoughts, which we all feel to be 
abstract and difficult, to the illustrations of them 
which we find in general human experience. The 
value of an abstract thought is its practical effect on 
human conduct. What effect on human conduct has 
this sublime thought of the sovereignty of God had: 
for of all philosophies as of all lives Christ's word 
holds true — " By their fruits ye shall know them." 

Turn, for example, to the life of St. Paul. That 
life touched on agony of vicissitude which few lives 
have known, and a mere recital of its sorrows might 
appal the bravest. It knew hunger, thirst, and 
weariness, the alienation of friends, and the most 
murderous hatred of enemies ; the loss of all things, 
and of the things that noble men value most, not 
goods and wealth, but honour, esteem, and respect: 
it knew physical suffering so intense that Paul spoke 
of himself as in deaths oft and dying daily: it knew 
a contempt from men so complete, that he says he 
had become as the offscouring of all things: it knew 
at last a violent death by martyrdom. The suffer- 
ings of Job, great as they were, are not comparable 
with the sufferings of Paul. And Paul knew also the 
withdrawn face of God, the denied prayer, the 
neglected appeal, the thorn in the flesh which caused 
him incurable and immitigable torture to his life's 

m 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



end. Yet you will find that the dominant note of 
Paul's life is triumph. He not merely does not com- 
plain of his sufferings, but he rejoices in them. His 
letters are not a tragic drama like the Book of Job: 
they are as the music of trumpets pealing round the 
dark dome of life, a sound of "harping symphonies 
and sevenfold hallelujahs!" And as you search his 
writings for the secret, you find it in the eighth chap- 
ter of his Epistle to the Romans — " Whom he did 
predestinate, them he also called : and whom he called, 
them he also justified: and whom he justified, them 
he also glorified. What shall we then say to these 
things? If God be for us, who can be against us? " 

There you have the secret; the belief in the ab- 
solute sovereignty of God, the sense of the pre-de- 
termined, and the consequent knowledge that nothing 
can happen to him for which God has not a reason, 
and a wise reason. He is God-inebriated, God-filled: 
lifted beyond the earth on wings of ecstasy : " sure 
of God as he is sure of life," and in a loftier language 
constantly repeats the saying of Elihu — " When 
God giveth quietness, who then can make trouble? 
if God be for us, who can be against us? " 

A man may of course retort, and no doubt the 
question is already on our lips, but how can a man 
know that God is with him? The answer is that 
man may be with God, by a complete surrender to 
the will of God. " I hope God will be on our side," 
was a remark made to Abraham Lincoln, in the dark 

58 



THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD 



days when America was torn by fratricidal strife. 

" Sir," said Lincoln, " I have never yet asked my- 
self whether God was on my side or not, but I tell 
you what, Sir, I am determined to be on God's side." 
And if any man asks me what is effectual calling, 
I say that you have the answer in that pregnant 
speech of Lincoln's. A man is on God's side who is 
on the side of truth, and righteousness, and virtue: 
for something in the bosom of the humblest man 
tells him that these things are dear to God. He is 
effectually called when he sets his soul on these 
things, and turns his face toward God's Zion. And 
those who are called, and obey the call, God shall 
justify: and those whom He justifies, He shall 
glorify. They who are upon God's side of truth, 
right, and virtue, alone have the right to say that 
God is for them. They alone grasp the secret of 
the Divine Sovereignty. And since all men can be 
upon God's side, if they will, all men may know the 
security and triumph of a peace which lifts them far 
above all the vicissitudes of earthly life, and teaches 
them to say out of the sacred silence of the sanctified 
and surrendered heart, " When God giveth quietness, 
who then shall make trouble ? " 

Turn again to history. It is not surprising that 
more and more the thoughts of cultured Englishmen 
are turned toward the great Puritan movement, for 
it gives us the key to all that is most vital and endur- 
ing in national character. But the more that move- 

59 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 

ment is studied the clearer does it become that its 
political force was really incidental — its real force 
was religious. One need not recall the speeches of 
Cromwell, the despatches of Blake, the psalms sung 
upon the battlefield — these are things familiar to 
us: but they all illustrate one truth, the sense of the 
sovereignty of God which made the Puritan what he 
was. Those who see the Puritan only on the battle- 
field and in the council chamber see but one part of 
him: there is yet a nobler part portrayed in his re- 
ligious experiences. It is no more than bare truth 
that Macaulay states of Puritanism when he says, 
" One overpowering sentiment had subjugated to 
itself pity and hatred, ambition and fear. Death had 
lost its terror and pleasure its charms. They had 
their smiles and their tears, their raptures and sor- 
rows, but not for the things of this world. The 
intensity of their feelings on one subject made them 
tranquil on every other." On what subject we ask? 
On this tremendous subject of the sovereignty of 
God. If they cared little for kings, it was because 
they were devoted to the King of Kings and Lord of 
Lords: if they despised priests, it was because they 
knew themselves priests unto God by the mystery of 
a divine call, and a truer ordination. They also 
knew the mystery of the hidden face of God — and 
of that let the tears of Fleetwood, and the cries of 
Cromwell bear witness. They knew calamity: but 
they also knew how to triumph over it. John Milton 

60 



THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD 



knew the worst calamity that can happen to the man 
of letters — - the total loss of sight ; but he uttered no 
petulant complaint, and he might well have written 
the noble lines which a modern poet has put into his 
mouth ; — 

I have naught to fear, 
This darkness is the shadow of Thy wing; 
Beneath it I am almost sacred: here 
Can come no evil thing. 

And John Milton would have said, not by way of 
accusation, but in vindication of the ways of God 
with man, " Hath not the Potter power over the clay 
to do with it as He will? " The sense of the Divine 
sovereignty did not depress him: it inspired him. 
And it was the same with all the Puritans. The one 
subject on which their feelings were intense was the 
relation in which they stood to God: once sure of 
that, once convinced that God reigned and that they 
were called to be His children, His servants, and the 
sheep of His pasture — they were tranquil on every 
other subject, and could say, " When God giveth 
quietness, who then can make trouble? " 

Or turn to modern biography, and recall the 
spiritual struggles of Carlyle, and the great emanci- 
pation which he won for himself, and for multitudes 
who through his words have been made wise unto 
salvation. He himself has told us how he won that 
emancipation ; " God over all, God through all, and 

61 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



God in us all " was the sum and substance of his Gos- 
pel. It is expressed again and again in all his works. 
When he rides by night past the old churchyard 
where the dead he loved were buried, an infinite peace 
comes upon him in the sense that God is over all. 
When the book on which he based all his hopes is 
burned, he speaks of the calamity as the chastise- 
ment of his invisible schoolmaster, and says, " What 
can I sorrowing do but obey — obey and think it the 
best ! " When he writes his magnificent description 
of the night before the battle of Dunbar the same 
note makes itself heard — " The hoarse sea moans 
bodeful, swinging low and heavy against these whin- 
stone bays: the sea and the tempest are abroad, and 
all else asleep but we — and there is One that rides 
upon the wings of the wind." The Divine Sov- 
ereignty once more: the steadfast sense that the world 
is rightly governed, that what we call histories and 
events is but God working — this was the strength of 
Carlyle's soul, it was upon this he based his life, and 
it is this conviction that has given him an influence 
on the best minds of the world, such as no other man 
since the days of the Hebrew prophets has wielded. 

Or turn to modern imaginative literature. Much 
of it is mere coloured froth: some of it glitters with 
the iridescent hues of decay: but here and there a 
book emerges which is what a good book should be, 
" The precious life blood of a master spirit." Take 
up the Window in Thrums, for example, and turn 

62 



THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD 



to the pathetic sketch called Dead this Twenty 
Years, It is merely the account of a child who died 
by accident twenty years before, and the mother's 
thoughts about it all, and her grief. And this is 
what she says, " Thou God seest me," she exclaims. 
" Just when I came to 4 Thou God seest me,' I let the 
book lie in my lap, for aince a body's sure o' that 
they're sure o' all: for I ken He was lookin' down 
when the cart gaed ower Joey, and He wanted to 
tak' my laddie to Himsel." And there is no other 
word said, or that can be said. To be sure that God 
reigns is to be sure of every thing, and when God 
giveth quietness, who then shall make trouble? 

And so then we see that the one thought in which 
man can find comfort and repose in the day of sorrow, 
in the hour of unforeseen calamity, in the total wreck 
of human happiness, is this thought of the sov- 
ereignty of God. No doubt it is a thought that has 
been much misunderstood, abused, and misapplied: 
but the wisest and greatest of men have known how 
to use it and to stay their souls upon it. It is mis- 
understood when a man says of calamities which seem 
inexplicable, " They are good because they are the will 
of God." This is after all but another form of 
stoicism, and is not far removed from the sullen sub- 
mission of the old pagan philosophers to a hierarchy 
of deities, whose government was caprice, whose will 
was tyranny, and whose ways were inscrutable. But 
it is rightly apprehended when a man says, w It is 

63 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



God's will because it is good: because in some way 
unknown to me God seeks to discipline me, and be- 
cause God is incapable of willing evil." When a man 
learns to say this he attains to the Divine quiet: 
peace descends upon him as a dew: alone, he is not 
alone; forsaken he is not forgotten; persecuted he is 
not destroyed, cast down he is not in despair ; for 
over the sea of life by him uncharted, and along 
the ways of the sea to him unknown, there falls the 
voice of the Heavenly Steersman, who cries " AIVs 
well." You and I have to face a life which is full of 
vicissitude. We know well enough that sorrows 
come upon us unexpectedly, and when we march 
most confidently to our Promised Land, we may find 
that our most tragic battle is yet to be fought. We 
cannot forget such things, and in our poor dumb, 
human way we often wonder how we shall meet such 
hours. Be sure of it mere human fortitude will not 
serve us then. Be sure of it stoicism will fail us, and 
no philosophic reconciliation to the inevitable will 
heal the wound that bleeds within. But one remedy 
for the troubled soul of man was never known to fail. 
Man can say, " God reigns — let God's will be done." 
He can realise that he is in the grasp of a mightier 
Power, who is not unloving, and that he is fulfilling a 
plan long predetermined. At every step of the way 
to his Calvary or his ascension, he may say as Jesus 
said, " The Son of man goeth, as it is written of him." 
Written where? In the inscrutable counsels of God 

64 



THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD 



to whom every life is known in its completeness 
before its first breath is drawn. You cannot read 
those counsels: " When God hideth His face, who 
then shall behold Him ? 99 But you may know that 
He reigns, and reigns in wisdom, righteousness, and 
love, and then you will so far triumph as to say, 
" All is in God's hands, my trouble and my joy alike, 
and when He giveth quietness, who shall make 
trouble? " 

And finally, the Book of Job declares the mystery 
of sorrow as solved in the mystery of Heaven. The 
Prologue gives us the key to the whole drama, when 
it shows Job's case as debated in heaven, and 
thoroughly understood there: the last act of the 
drama is the Divine intervention. A whirlwind once 
more blows, but not now to destroy, for God Himself 
rides upon its wings, and a Voice out of the whirl- 
wind cries, " Whatsoever is under the whole heaven 
is mine." And again He cries, " Who is this that 
darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge ? 99 

And at last Job replies, " I lay my hand upon my 
mouth. I have heard by the hearing of the ear : but 
now mine eye seeth thee." And behold the whirl- 
wind passes and there is peace. Peace in the heavens 
that are as a sapphire for clearness, peace on the 
earth where the evening breeze begins to blow, and 
peace within the soul of Job. The dream of Heaven 
has come to him, with its promise of the very vision 
of God, its perfect knowledge, its solution of all 

65 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



earthly mystery ; and because he is now sure of the 
Beneficent Sovereignty of God, he is able to believe 
that " there will come another era, when it shall be 
light, and man will awake from his lofty dreams to 
find his dream still there, and that nothing has gone 
save his sleep." O most dread and mighty Sovereign 
of the Earth and the Heavens, Thou who art the 
First and Last, the Beginning and the End, from 
whom nothing is hid, be it ours to serve Thee in 
humility, faithfulness, and truth, and so in the hour 
of trouble Thou shalt hide us in Thy pavilion, and 
when the dream of life is past, behold we shall awake 
in Thy image, and be satisfied. 



66 



FULFILMENT 



IV 



FULFILMENT 

"That it might be fulfilled."— Matt. ii. 23. 

f | ^HREE times in the course of eight verses do 
JL we come upon this phrase : it chimes upon the 
ear like the sound of a persistent bell. These eight 
verses narrate things which in themselves seem tragic 
and disastrous, and to which men would give the name 
of accident: but the Divine Word for them is That it 
might be fulfilled. They narrate the hurried and 
perilous flight into Egypt — the slaughter of the in- 
nocents, the return to Nazareth — each an incident 
wholly unforeseen, and surcharged with bitterness or 
sadness. Consider the pathetic picture of these 
anxious fugitives, with the Child of miracle upon 
their bosoms, driven out of Judaea by a great fear, 
flying for their lives upon an unknown path, until 
at last they see with tired eyes the Nile, the land of 
strange pyramids and vast temples, built ages be- 
fore by the toiling slaves who were their ancestors; 
and does not that read like a tragic accident? Hear 
the voice of weeping and lamentation in Rama — 
must it not have seemed to many a mother who sat 

69 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



with a mangled babe upon her lap, that God was 
far away and forgetful of her sorrows? Consider 
the fugitives as the}'' return, driven by the exigency 
of bread to dwell in a little town notorious for the 
godlessness and worthlessness of its inhabitants — 
and can Joseph and Mary discern, think you, any 
wise or beneficent end in such a fate? Yet each of 
these incidents was a link in a chain which bound 
eternity to time ; it was a master-stroke of destiny ; it 
was the result of predetermined and inevitable pur- 
pose; it all happened That it might be fulfilled. 
God was never nearer the world than in the hour when 
the cry of the bereaved mothers rose in Rama ; never 
more surely at work in the shaping of human events 
than when these insignificant fugitives paused beside 
the Nile, or entered footsore and disheartened into 
Nazareth. Even the craft and wickedness of Herod 
yielded its quota to the establishment of prophecy, 
and without meaning or imagining it, Herod was 
obeying the prophets, and acting upon the compul- 
sion of a Divine Providence. Is there, indeed, any- 
thing that happens in the world, any crime, or folly, 
or error of man's, that can be truly called accidental, 
an interruption or breaking away from the Divine 
order? Is not the very wickedness of man a contri- 
bution to the triumph of goodness, and like the 
wickedness of Herod, something that happens for 
the fulfilment of a larger scheme of goodness? 
Now, here are three incidents in history: one, a 
70 



FUL FILMENT 

piece of painful human vicissitude — the second, a 
piece of horrible wickedness — the third, the sad 
irony of trouble which poverty is compelled to know, 
and each is set before us in no way accidental, but 
so far the reverse of accidental, that it is the un- 
mistakable revelation of a Divine force working in 
the world. Perhaps the first thing we need to do 
is to understand our terms. Manifestly what is 
meant is not that Christ was carried into Egypt 
because Hosea predicted it; or that the children 
are slain because Jeremiah spoke of lamentation and 
great weeping in Rama: or that the infant grew 
up in Nazareth because the prophets spoke of a 
Divine Deliverer who should come out of Nazareth. 
To read the saying in this spirit would be to accuse 
Mary and Joseph of deliberate collusion, with an 
attempt to act a part, which is manifestly absurd; 
or which is little better, to suggest that things were 
bound to fall out as they did, simply because a 
Hebrew prophet had obscurely hinted at some such 
event. No: the truth lies in the reverse direction: 
the thing happened not because it was prophesied: 
but it was prophesied because it had to happen. 
For what is prophecy? It is two things, forth- 
telling and foretelling. The prophets were mainly 
forthtellers, and the great burden of their work 
was the exposition of great moral and spiritual 
truths. But ever and again, in some condition of 
spiritual ecstasy, they saw the clouds clear from the 

71 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



sky of the future, and caught momentary glimpses of 
the far-off dawn of a new time. They saw as men 
see in dreams, places, cities and countries, strangely 
vivid and real, and yet built of luminous mist and 
shadows only; they felt the incommunicable thrill 
of great events, linking themselves to such places, 
and heard the movements of the men and women 
who should inhabit them — and then they became 
foretellers. They had only a limited comprehension 
of their own words. They were unable to attach 
any quite definite meaning to them. They spoke 
as men speak in dreams, with vagueness and yet 
with a thrilling accent of truth. Those who heard 
them speak treasured their words, for they instinc- 
tively felt that there was a mystic meaning in them 
which some day would be made clear. Hosea had 
no actual vision of Christ in Egypt, Jeremiah no 
vivid and exact prevision of what it was that would 
make Rama a place of mourning; but each spoke 
in such a way, that when centuries afterwards cer- 
tain things happened, men said, and said truly — 
" Behold the prophets said these things." Neither 
they, nor any since them, have understood what 
they really meant: but we know. To-day is this 
Scripture fulfilled ; but it is fulfilled, not in arbitrary 
obedience to the word of a prophet, but the prophet 
spoke in obedience to a Divine instinct, he and we 
being both alike witnesses to the Divine order which 
rules the world. It is thus and thus alone that 

72 



FULFILMENT 



prophecy can become rational, intelligible, and a real 
communication of God made through the souls and 
minds of men. 

But some one will very naturally say, " It is not so 
much with the nature of prophecy that we are con- 
cerned, as with the moral, personal, and theological 
questions involved in these statements. Take the 
personal question for example. Here is an obscure 
Jewish family driven into exile by the tyranny of 
Herod many centuries ago. Probably such a thing 
often happened in the days of Herod, who appears 
to have been one of the worst of rulers. But are we 
to believe that the actions of these men and women 
were of such consequence ta the Supreme power, 
that it was well-known centuries before what they 
would do, and that what they did was done under 
the direct though unrecognised compulsion of the 
Almighty? " And to that question I reply, why not? 
Are we conscious of no compulsions of Providence? 
Are we not warned by our instincts in our dealings 
with one another, in our choice of the path we tread, 
in the sum of those small and large decisions which 
make up our destiny? Has no voice ever said to 
us, " this is the way — walk ye in it 99 ; and has no 
voice told us that some other way our pride or 
ignorance would have chosen, was the way of peril 
or of death? And if we pass from the study of our 
own life to the lives of those who have bulked large 
before the world, who have done great things among 

73 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



their fellow men, and whose every stage of develop- 
ment and action is a matter of public scrutiny and 
general interest — is there any biography that does 
not teach the doctrine of divine compulsion as 
one of the best verified facts of life? Socrates may 
call it the voice of his daemon, Knox may call it the 
voice of God, by Abraham Lincoln it is heard in 
dreams, by Luther in the whispers of the air; but is 
there any man who has ever attained to greatness 
as thinker or actor, who has not confessed that he 
has been the creature of mysterious compulsions, 
with a consciousness of moving in predetermined 
ways? And are not such confessions of a piece with 
the similar confessions of writers of the greatest 
genius, such as Milton and George Eliot, who have 
plainly stated that their very genius seemed not so 
much a thing of themselves, as the impartation to 
the mind of a message from the outside, by a species 
of Divine compulsion on the thought? That it might 
be fulfilled — the saying touches all lives. It is the 
confession alike of our glory and our impotence, and 
we have only to look within ourselves to find ample 
vindication of its truth. 

But again it will be said, " That is not all ; what 
about the moral question which is involved? One 
of the events in this chapter is a wanton and 
bloody massacre. It is, as you have said, a piece of 
horrible wickedness. It would no doubt be too ab- 
surd to suppose that it happened merely to give 

74 



FULFILMENT 

coherence and sense to a saying of Jeremiah; but is 
it possible to suppose that it happened at all by the 
permission of God? Does God recognise evil as a 
weapon for the carrying out of His designs, and can 
evil be recognised as a servant in the triumph of 
goodness?" And again I say, why not? For which 
is better, to think of evil as outside God's control 
or within it? Which is the more pious act of 
thought, to regard wickedness as something God 
cannot restrain, or as something perpetually defeated 
in its ultimate aims by the compulsion God puts upon 
it? And here again, does not the actual spectacle 
of life and history teach us something? This mas- 
sacre in Rama was small and unnoticeable compared 
with the immolation of the Piedmontese, the slaughter 
of the Vaudois, and the barbarities of the Spaniards 
in the Netherlands, to say nothing of the martyr- 
doms of the early Christians. There have been 
times in human history, not so far away, when not 
a village or a district, but whole provinces and em- 
pires have wailed for their dead, and every house has 
been a house of mourning. There have been such 
wrongs wrought in outrage and spoliation that cen- 
turies have not been sufficient to wash out the stain 
of blood, or roll back the shadow that has fallen 
on a land. And in relation to such periods one of 
two statements is true: either God had abdicated 
the government of the world in these lurid reigns 
of blood, or God permitted them for a higher pur- 

75 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



pose; and the one statement ends in atheism as the 
other leads to faith and piety. But, as a matter 
of fact no competent historian has ever made the 
first statement. There can be no doubt that the 
surest possible weapon for the propagation of a 
religion is martyrdom. Such faith in Christ as 
Europe possesses to-day, such liberty of thought and 
reverence for truth, is the direct fruit of the days 
when the price of liberty was torture, and the crown 
of truth was death. For the final verdict on all such 
events — a verdict which cannot be delivered until 
ages have passed and historical perspectives have 
grown clear — is that in the long run truth only lives, 
and the wickedness of the wicked is compelled into 
the service of goodness and of truth. Herod does 
his work, but even he, in the very doing of his work, 
is fulfilling prophecy. The wailing in Rama is but 
the discordant tuning of the instruments in that 
divine orchestra which is presently to fill the world 
with an enduring music of love and hope. Wait till 
the discord dies away — then you will find its fulfil- 
ment in the larger music of eternity, which shall roll 
across the world, rousing it from its sleep, and cre- 
ating a new soul under the very ribs of death. 

But again it will be said — " What about the theo- 
logical question? " In what does this differ from 
the doctrines of necessity and fatalism? Does it not 
lead directly to that saddest confession of the saddest 
poet of our time — 

76 



FULFILMENT 



If one is born a certain day on earth, 
All times and seasons tended to that birth, 
Not all the world could change or hinder it: 
I find no hint throughout the universe, 
Of good or ill, of blessing or of curse, 
I find alone necessity supreme. 

In other and quite plain words, could Herod help 
what he did? And can the bad man who, by mar- 
tyring the innocent, unconsciously but really works 
out the ultimate victory of the good — can he help 
playing the part he plays? Assuredly he can, for 
men are not mere puppets and blind mechanisms in 
the hand of God. A man who enters an express 
train is not responsible for its motion, but he is 
responsible for entering it. Once within it he must 
submit to its compulsion, and it is possible enough 
that it may carry him to some unintended bourne ; 
but it was by his act, and his alone that he entered 
it. No: this is not fatalism, it is a very different 
thing; it is the statement of the real control of God 
over the world. Men act for one end, and God 
guides their action to quite another; men set their 
course, as the sailor does, and duly steer by it; but 
in every ocean there are tides and currents, winds 
and eddies that imperceptibly draw or drift the ship 
out of the exact course marked upon the map of 
man. We are undoubtedly free agents, and yet 
there is a law of gravitation which we obey every 
moment of our lives although we know nothing about 

77 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



it. And that then is the first and great point on 
which we fix our thoughts. It is not the veracity of 
the prophets that is being proved, it is the real 
sovereignty of God. It is not the correspondence 
between a saying of Jeremiah and the wickedness 
of Herod that is of interest, it is the fact of the 
real control of God over all human events. That 
which stands out large and luminous is the truth 
that compulsions of Providence touch every life; 
that we have relations to infinite forces of which we 
take small account; that our acts, which seem so 
intimately our own, are controlled and guided by a 
secret hand of which we are but dimly conscious; 
that God reigns over good and evil alike — unresting, 
unhasting, immutable — thwarted by no accident, 
deflected from His sovereign purposes by no revolt 
of man's — God reigns — and when the book of time 
is closed its final word will be — That it might be 
fulfilled. 

But now, in the second place, let the mind dwell 
upon the word fulfilled, for in it is contained the 
mystery of hope of the Advent. What is fulfilment? 
The fruit is the fulfilment of the bloom, the meridian 
day is the fulfilment of the dawn. What we mean by 
the word as it is applied to Christ is, that there was 
something foreshadowed, and in Him that something 
was revealed ; that on the lip of time there was a 
whisper and a suggestion, of which Christ was the 
uttered word; in the fulness of time "the Word 

78 



FULFILMENT 



became flesh and dwelt among us." How then, and 
in what way was Christ a fulfilment of foreshadowed 
things ? 

We find the answer in two directions: the first of 
which is that His person and His life fulfilled cer- 
tain conditions long predicted. Let the minds of 
all who have the most casual knowledge of Scrip- 
ture, range for a moment over the long series of 
predictions which by common consent have been ap- 
plied to Jesus of Nazareth. They cover a vast 
period of time, and were uttered by a great variety 
of speakers. They are at once vague and definite. 
They become most precise in the mouth of Isaiah, 
who speaks of the lowly birth, the healing ministry, 
the sorrowful tragedy, the rejection, betrayal, and 
burial of One who is to bear the stripes wherewith 
we are healed, and to triumph by the force of virtue, 
meekness and love. Places and persons are named — 
" He is the Root of David," and His birthplace is 
Bethlehem. He is to prove something more than a 
local patriot : " He is the Desire of all Nations." 
His reign is to be widespread and everlasting : " He 
shall have the heathen for His heritage, and the utter- 
most parts of the earth for His possession." Through 
hundreds of years of Jewish history, this sublime 
figure was adumbrated to the Jewish mind. It is not 
pretended that either before or after Christ any other 
man fulfilled these conditions; and the proof of this 
statement is that the Jews still pray for the coming of 

79 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



Him of whom Isaiah spoke. But in Jesus of Naza- 
reth all these minute and manifold conditions were 
accurately fulfilled. Men did recognise in Him the 
long promised Messiah. He Himself, in the calm 
survey of His own career after His resurrection, asked 
whether the predicted Christ ought not to have 
suffered the things He suffered, and to have entered 
into His glory? I ask for nothing more than a 
rational and unbiassed consideration of these facts. 
Did these predictions mean anything or nothing? 
If they were true foreshadowings, who else is there 
who has in the least degree fulfilled these condi- 
tions? Where else in history is there any figure in 
whom all these predictions converge with such aston- 
ishing and perfect accuracy? I confess that for me 
there is nothing in human history so miraculous 
as this story, and the proof of its effect upon the 
human mind is that all the most cultured, enlightened, 
and civilized nations of the world have accepted 
Christianity and found in Jesus of Nazareth the long 
predicted and Divine Redeemer. 

It was one of the beautiful and pathetic beliefs of 
the old Norsemen, quoted by Mr. Balfour in his 
Foundation of Belief, that when a man died his spirit 
survived him, and haunted as a ghost for a long time 
the scenes of his earthly life. " At first," says he, 
" vivid and almost lifelike, it slowly waned and faded, 
until at length it vanished, leaving behind it no 
trace or memory of its spectral presence among the 

80 



FULFILMEN T 



throngs of living men." Let us reverse the legend, 
and then apply it to this subject. For long ages the 
faint adumbration of a divine deliverer haunted the 
minds of men. At first dim and spectral, the vision 
grew upon the minds of men, becoming with each 
age more definite and perfect. It fortified and in- 
vigorated the failing heart of the world with a new 
hope. Others besides Balaam learned to say, " I 
shall see Him but not now; I shall behold Him but 
not nigh. There shall come a Star out of Jacob, and 
a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel." Before the mind 
of a Plato as well as an Isaiah, this slowly growing 
vision passes, and each foresees the advent of some 
perfectly just One, by whom the world should be 
saved. Out of the films and spectral profundities 
of the future this face grew into clearness — this 
figure emerged into distinctness — until at last the 
spiritual and ghostly put on a human form, and 
God became flesh and dwelt among us. The dream 
was ended — the reality had come. Hope had ful- 
filled itself — faith was to begin. The vision was no 
more a vision; the palpable Redeemer spoke indeed 
" with man's voice by the marvellous sea," and stood 
before men with a human brow — and all this hap- 
pened — That it might he fulfilled. 

But the element of fulfilment is still more 
strikingly seen in the teaching of Christ. No one 
will venture to deny that long before the birth of 
Christ many pious and noble ideals of religion pos- 

81 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



sessed the world, and not among the Jews alone. 
All that is meant by chastity, courage and fortitude, 
honour and duty and loyalty to truth, the subjuga- 
tion of personal aims to public ideals, and a corre- 
sponding reverence for and service of the state, ex- 
isted among the earlier Romans ; and when we would 
learn and enforce these lessons to-day we can still find 
no nobler books than the literature with which Rome 
has furnished us. Nor can we forget that centuries 
before Christ a great religious revival had occurred 
in India, the main ethics of which were the mastery 
of the flesh, the complete sacrifice of the individual 
to the service of his fellows, and a noble passion to 
communicate the truths wherein spiritual freedom 
were found to all who would listen, irrespective of 
condition, state, or country. The very watchword of 
Rome was duty: the watchword of Buddha was still 
nobler — it was " delivered yourself, deliver others ; 
and saved, make haste to save." It would be an un- 
grateful blasphemy against the Giver of all good and 
perfect gifts to deny or forget these things. But 
the more narrowly you examine the ancient religions 
of Rome and India, the more obvious is their lack of 
a true central element. They were not revelations of 
God : they could exist without God. With the Roman, 
morality was wholly divorced from piety — he went 
to the philosopher for his morals, and the priest for 
his religion. In Buddhism God did not appear; it 
was a religion of men toward men — the sublimest 



FULFILMENT 



effort of pure altruism ever made by the unaided 
genius of man. But the greatest of all questions was 
overlooked — the problem of God received no solu- 
tion. Was God magnanimous or merciful? Was it 
possible to love Him, or only to fear Him as an unex- 
plained terror? That question was never answered 
perfectly till Christ came. But He answered it, and 
with His reply the world has been content. He ful- 
filled all of truth that was foreshadowed in the re- 
ligions of Rome and India. He supplied the omitted, 
the neglected, element. He revealed the Father. At 
last the dumb lips of Time uttered more than a 
suggestive whisper — they spoke the living Word — 
and " we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only 
begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth." 
" I came," He said, " not to destroy but to fulfil " and 
with Him the gray dawn of truth passed into that 
perfect light which was the life of men — and all 
this happened that the sovereign will of God might 
be fulfilled. 

And so then I come back to the great and vital 
truth of the real sovereignty of God over the world, 
with which we started. 

Among many Oriental legends which gather round 
the temple of Solomon is one that has a touch of 
vivid significance — it is that Solomon died during 
the building of the Temple, but that his body re- 
mained leaning on a staff, and overlooking the work- 
men as though it were alive. Picture it, this gray 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 

and awful figure, forever rigid and immutable, there 
between the pinnacles of the Temple, with the first 
ray of morn, and there with the last star at night — 
spectral, terrible, lonely — toward which the trembling 
workmen turned fearful glances when the cloud low- 
ered, or the light failed or the moon silvered all the 
earth with ghostly splendour ! Picture the dead king, 
feared by the living workmen, who shrink from that 
dead eye which death himself cannot wholly close I 
It is a ghastly fancy, but not more ghastly than the 
thoughts men have had of God. For multitudes of 
men around us, God is but a dead Solomon ; He has 
neither life, nor breath, nor motion. He is awful 
enough to impose some restraint upon the thought, 
but is as impotent as the dead King to impose restraint 
upon the conduct of men. He is but the dead figure- 
head of a forsaken universe. O my brethren, it is to 
deliver us from this most paralysing of all thoughts, 
that the incarnation took place. The birth of Christ 
is God's proof to us that He lives, that He rules, that 
He loves us. Until we believe with all our hearts 
in the real and vital sovereignty of God over this 
world of seeming turmoil and disorder, God is but 
a name to us, and religion but a habit of transmitted 
formalism. Look once more upon the whole scene 
— this fitting together of prediction and event — 
this overruling of evil for the work of infinite good, 
and learn that God reigns, and all these things hap- 
pened that His will might be fulfilled. 

84 



FULFILMENT 

And lastly, this truth of the real sovereignty of 
God I know not how to grasp, except as it is revealed 
to me in Jesus Christ. I can grasp the idea of a 
religion such as Rome knew; a certain Divinity in 
the State which demands my reverence, and con- 
strains my duty. I can grasp the idea of a hu- 
manly altruistic religion such as Buddha taught, and 
the supreme need there is that I should love my 
fellow man better than myself if I am to justify 
my uses of existence. But I know not where to 
look for the revelation of a God to whom I can 
pray, whom I can adore and love, except in Jesus 
Christ. Some supreme Person in the universe I may 
suspect, but he may be dead as the dead king upon 
the roof of the unfinished temple for all I know. 
At the present hour perhaps this question of the real 
sovereignty of God may seem to have but a remote 
relation to your life. It may seem at best an 
abstruse and academic question. But the hour will 
surely come — in death if not earlier — when the 
supreme agony of your soul will sum itself up in the 
cry — does God live? Does God care anything for 
me? Am I anybody to God? God's reply to that 
deepest cry of humanity is Bethlehem. Immanuel 
— God with us — is the message of hope which the 
Church has gone on proclaiming for centuries — 
God with us in our pain, in our humiliations, in 
our lowest deeps of suffering, in our uttermost lone- 
liness of death — God with us in our living and our 

85 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



dying — and we, by the grace of Christ's redemp- 
tion with God for evermore, in the unknown fe- 
licity of eternal life. To know this is to know all 
that can be known of spiritual truth, to live by it 
is to realise all that can be realised of inward peace, 
for henceforth we can say, " God has been with 
us in the cradle and the grave — God has been for us 
in our extremity and distress — and if God be for us, 
who can be against us ? " 



86 



TIMELESSNESS 



V 



TIMELESSNESS 

"One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thou- 
sand years as one day." — 2 Peter iii. 8. 

THIS passage affirms Timelessness as one of the 
attributes of God. The end and beginning 
are as one with Him. Space and period are non- 
existent. You can discover the beginning and the 
end of a line: but not of the circle: for the circle 
ends where it begins and begins where it ends. Per- 
haps this was the animating idea of Ezekiel in his 
strange imagery of the ever-revolving wheel full of 
eyes : he saw in the circle of the wheel the type of 
the unendingness of God. 

Now to creatures finite and limited as we are, such 
thoughts and conceptions put an almost intolerable 
stress upon the mind. For, at first sight, it would 
appear, that Time is the ruling principle of the world. 
Seconds, minutes, days, months, years, centuries, 
epochs — it is by such measurements we take account 
of things". They are the milestones on the road of 
our existence. Our very life beats itself out by a 
pulse that registers its movements. The very sun 

89 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



moves in the harness of Time and obeys a punctual 
law. What then are we to make of that great open- 
ing clause of the prayer of Moses, the man of God, 
" Lord Thou hast been our dwelling place in all gen- 
erations: from everlasting to everlasting, Thou art 
God? " Or, what of that strange paradox of the 
Psalmist — " In Thy book all my members were writ- 
ten, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet 
there were none of them ? " 

Consider what these things imply: that we were 
nourished in the bosom of God's Everlasting before 
we knew the limits of Time; that in Him we were, 
when as yet we were not: that our substance existed 
in Him before it existed at all — as we understand 
existence. Well may we feel the stress put upon 
our thought as intolerable — but is not the one clear 
thing this, that for us also Time has no real existence, 
and a thousand years are as one day? 

In such sayings human thought seems to overleap 
its own limits, and why? Let two facts, which are 
common to man, afford us the explanation. The first 
fact is, that to us the idea of anything without limit is 
terrible. It is this which lends an aspect of awfulness 
to the sea — it seems an unbounded immensity. We 
are easy in our minds when the shore is in sight, or 
not far away ; but who has not been oppressed with a 
sense of something dreadful and lonely when he has 
sailed over its central depths, and reflected that those 
depths are from three to six miles, so that the highest 

90 



TIMELESSNESS 



mountain of the earth if dropped into the ocean would 
be utterly covered and forgotten as though it were a 
pebble thrown by the hand of a child upon the shore? 
The same thing affects us, but with increased inten- 
sity, when we gaze into a telescope, and see not only 
stars but tremendous chasms of space where no star 
shines, unlighted voids, the sites as it were of worlds 
either not yet created, or long since ruined and dis- 
persed like such cities as Nineveh or Babylon. For 
the sky has its waste places, its infinitudes, and they 
are appalling. Looking into the depths of the heav- 
ens " there is a size," it has been said, " at which dig- 
nity begins: further on there is a size at which 
grandeur begins: further on there is a size at which 
awfulness begins: further on a size at which ghast- 
liness begins." The imaginative powers confronted 
with such a spectacle simply bury themselves in the 
depths of a great horror. But whence this sense of 
horror? It is the horror of the illimitable. And it 
is even so we feel about God, when once we have 
grasped the idea of the illimitableness of God. From 
everlasting to everlasting Thou art God — it fright- 
ens us. With God a thousand years as one day — 
we shrink from the awfulness of the thought and 
say, How dreadful is this place! How natural is 
idolatry in the light of such a thought ! How much 
easier to make an image of that which is unthinkable, 
and worship that — the plain, the tangible, the lim- 
ited symbol of the illimitable. Was it not because 

91 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



idolatry is the natural act of man in the face of the 
illimitable that God' put into the forefront of all 
His commandments to man this — Thou shalt not 
make a graven image nor bow down to it — I am 
that I am — and Me the eternal Present and Near, 
only shalt thou worship? 

Again, when once we have put a limit to things our 
minds are at ease. It is something to know the boun- 
daries, and depths of the ocean — at all events it is 
less terrible to us than to the Argonauts, and the 
early voyagers and discoverers, who were the first to 
break into the silent sea. The horror is gone when 
we know the limit. It is the same with astronomy. 
We may take its enormous figures — and tell ourselves 
that the light moves at the rate of twelve million 
miles a minute : that the sun and all the solar system 
is rushing onward to a certain point in the constella- 
tion of Hercules at the rate of thirty-three million 
miles a year; and that it will reach that fixed ter- 
minus in a little less than two million years. Such 
figures are almost unthinkable — nevertheless they do 
not alarm us. And why? Because they are figures 
— because they put a limit on things. After a while 
it becomes as easy to say thirty-three millions, as one, 
two, three. The rest is merely a matter of multipli- 
cation, and we find peace of mind in our arithmetic. 
But from everlasting to everlasting — the timeless, 
the boundless, the illimitable — it is that which ap- 
pals and frightens us. One day as a thousand years 

92 



TIMELESSNESS 



■ — it seems as if the centre of gravity in all our 
thought were lost — and we are dumb not only with 
perplexity, but with a nameless awe. 

Here then is the first practical truth on which we 
may lean. You ask of God a task nearly unthinkable 
■ — that He shall number the hairs on the head of 
every human creature, and that no multitudinous 
sparrow shall fall to the ground without His knowl- 
edge. You ask really far more than that even ; that 
not the least creature in all His worlds shall be beyond 
His cognisance and care. For who can doubt that 
the innumerous stars we see above us are inhabited? 
It would be a strange thing indeed if among all these 
rushing worlds only one, and that the least, had 
inhabitants. And it would be still more inconceiv- 
able that if they are inhabited, God cares only for the 
people of the earth, and neither knows nor cares for 
anything beyond this one troubled star. In other 
words, if the very hairs on the heads of men are num- 
bered, it is a necessity of thought that no less can be 
said or imagined of the peoples of a million stars, the 
distant light alone of which is known to us. How 
can such a task be accomplished? Only by One who 
is timeless, boundless, illimitable. He might do it — 
no other. For if there be a limit anywhere with God 
the whole thought breaks down — I may be outside 
that limit as truly as the humblest creature of the 
furthest star, and for all I know I am without it. If 
God can overlook a world how much easier to overlook 

93 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



me ! So then, the one foothold and certainty of faith 
is in this illimitability of God, and we express not 
only our own faith, but the faith of all the worlds, 
when we say, " From everlasting to everlasting — 
Thou art God ! " This is indeed the creed of the 
universe, rehearsing which the sons of God shout for 
joy, and the morning stars sing together. 

But let us turn to another phase of the thought. 
We have admitted that all our thoughts and concep- 
tions are governed by the sense of Time: yet do we 
not find that Timelessness also enters into our own 
life? There are occasions in all human life, when 
that strong apocalyptic angel who stands upon the 
sea and upon the earth — upon the intangible and the 
tangible, the fluid and the fixed — lifts his hand to 
heaven, and swears by Him that liveth for ever and 
ever, that Time shall be no more. What occasions are 
these? Have we ever known them? Let us name 
and examine two only. 

First, imagination is Timeless. In the flash of an 
instant, and the least conceivable fraction of an in- 
stant, I am with Adam in Eden, I see the waters of 
the flood, I experience all of the thrill and passion of 

Old, unhappy, far-off things, 
And battles long ago. 

Light may travel swiftly : but I can outspeed the 
light. I may talk of centuries — but they are mere 
forms and conveniences of speech — they mean noth- 

94 



TIMELESSNESS 



ing. The scholar lives not in the university of Ox- 
ford — he lives with Homer in old Greece: the his- 
torian of the Roman Empire lives not at Lausanne 
but under the shadow of the Coliseum. Men saw 
Gibbon writing in that old garden at Lausanne but 
it was only his corporeal frame they saw — his mind 
was far away. For the historian, life has no tenses 
— the imagination has destroyed them. Here, at 
least, it becomes literally true for all of us that a 
thousand years are as one day — and that while Time 
may regulate our clocks, it cannot put the least 
hindrance on our spirits, or on the life of our minds. 

In the same way it is true that emotion is Timeless. 
" It seems but yesterday," says the old man as he talks 
of his early life: and it is but yesterday, for Time is 
to him in such a solemn moment of reminiscence, as 
though it were not. " The pain is as keen to-day as 
it ever was," says the mourner: undoubtedly, for 
Time has no jurisdiction over sorrow. It is many 
years since the mother or the child died: but have 
years done anything to make the loss less real? Do 
we not still wake in the night and see it all, feel it all 
again: the pang of heart with which we read the 
tragic telegram, the hasty journey, the agony of im- 
patience, the trembling hand upon the door, the 
whispered word, the pale face upon the pillow, the 
dim light, the eyes that met ours in an ineffable 
yearning — the very smell of sickness, and the merest 
trifles of the room, such as the watch ticking beside 

95 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



the bed, and the text of Scripture on the wall? What 
has Time to do with such poignant experiences as 
these? Absolutely nothing. We have passed into 
the limitless. If we live beyond the earth, we think 
these things will still live in us. And of this we are 
sure, that for those who have passed beyond the earth 
love still lives, and Time and Space are powerless to 
destroy it. Does not every true lover, for whom love 
is of the soul, feel and acquiesce in the solemn pathos 
and faith of the dying Pompilia's speech in Brown- 
ing's, " Ring and the Book 99 : 

In heaven we have the real and true, and sure, 

'Tis there they neither marry nor are given 

In marriage but are as the angels: right, 

O how right that is, how like Jesus Christ 

To say that! . . . 

Be as the angels rather, who, apart, 

Know themselves into one, are found at length 

Married, but marry never, no, nor give 

In marriage. 

So, let him wait, God's instant men call years. 

" God's instant men call years " — that which was, and 
is and will be — and is not that also saying that with 
God a thousand years are as one day ; and with us too, 
when we feel ourselves to be not perishable bodies, 
but imperishable and immortal spirits? Time does 
not breathe indeed on the fadeless bloom of this world 
of the emotions — and it is the angel of love, of death- 

96 



TIME LESS NESS 



less tenderness and passion who swears by Him who 
liveth for ever, that Time shall be no more. 

What is it then that we ascertain by the contempla- 
tion of such a fact as this? It is that Time regulates 
our outer life but it has no power over our mind. It 
is that whether we recognise it or not there is an 
immortal part in us, even as the wise writer of Ec- 
clesiastes said, " also God hath set eternity in the 
heart of man." It is that beyond all other things we 
see that love knows nothing of Time — for the love 
we had for the dead mother or the child we still have 
— not a pang is lost, not a kiss forgotten : years have 
altered nothing, for " love is not love that alteration 
knows." Now see then how things fit in with this 
truth. What is God? God is love, is the sublime 
reply. What is love? Love is an emotion without 
limit; it knows neither past nor future; it is an eter- 
nal Now. 

Do we complain of our insignificance, our distance 
from God, and the impossibility of God knowing any- 
thing of us? Time, distance, space, nearness, farness, 
have no existence with God. They have no existence 
with love. The whole breadth of the world may yawn 
between us and the one human creature we love best : 
but it has no effect on our love. Infinite vastness 
may intrude itself between us and God: it has no 
effect upon His love. In that eternal Now of the 
divine love all men are included : nay all creatures are 
included too: for the saying of Christ is not only 

97 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



that the very hairs of our head are all numbered, but 
that not a sparrow falls to the ground — its tiny 
song stilled, its infinitesimal spark of life extinguished 
— without the Father. 

There are many expressions in the Bible which 
seem to us entirely inscrutable. Thus, when Jesus 
pronounces the blessing of the faithful servants, He 
says, u Inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from 
the foundation of the world" In His great sacra- 
mental prayer our Lord prays that His disciples may 
know the love wherewith God loved Him before the 
foundation of the world. St. Paul speaks of those 
who were chosen in God before the foundation of tlxe 
world; and St. John speaks of the Lamb who was 
slain from the foundation of the world. What can 
these words mean ? Is not this an even more perplex- 
ing paradox than the Psalmist's when he speaks of his 
members being fashioned when as yet there were none 
of them? How can men be loved before they exist, 
and Christ be slain before He is born? The answer 
once more is that God is the I Am — the eternal pres- 
ent tense — the Alpha and Omega, the beginning 
and the end. There is no to be with God — all is. 
Past and present run together, and are annihilated 
in Him. The Cross was from eternity, the love from 
eternity, and the Lamb is not slain at some period of 
Time that we can name, but from the foundation of 
the world. In the eternal day of the Most High 
there is neither dawn nor night — - it is one sacred 

98 



TIMELESSNESS 



high eternal noon, and a thousand years are but as 
one day. 

But this is not all. Think yet again: do we not 
discover in such expressions the hint of some real 
correspondence of nature between man and God? 
To be known, chosen, and loved before the foundation 
of the world must mean, if it mean anything, that 
there is something in us that existed before the foun- 
dation of the world, and will out-last it. For the 
Psalmist speaks only of his physical frame, his mem- 
bers as written in the book of God before they were 
fashioned: what was it God loved in him then in the 
day when he was not so far as his earthly part was 
concerned? Manifestly the soul. And there at last 
we reach the clue which threads the mystery : we were 
all souls before we were bodies, and we shall still be 
souls, when our bodies have returned to dust. And 
for the soul Time does not exist, nor space, nor near- 
ness, nor farness: and the love of God to man is the 
immortal embracing the immortal, that which always 
was, communing . with that which always was and is: 
the Timeless locked in eternal fellowship with the 
Timeless. " Thou art from everlasting to everlast- 
ing — we shall not die " — cried the Hebrew prophet : 
no, because we also live and move in the everlasting 
Now of the Highest. O, man, living for nothing 
beyond the day, seeing all things as bounded by the 
mean horizon of Time, hear this: thou wert before 
the foundation of the world, and thou wilt be when 

99 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



the world has passed away ! There is no such thing 
as the horizon — we know well enough that it is a 
mere optical delusion. That blue rim and edge of 
the world you think you see is no rim — it is the 
abyss. Travel toward it — you cannot reach it ; try 
to touch it — it is not. A mirage, an hallucination 
only — that is all it is : and Time itself is even such 
an hallucination. Our life knows abysses but no 
horizons : our troubled years are but a moment in the 
everlasting Being: and for us also a thousand years 
are as one day. 

I admit that language toils in vain to express these 
things: that they are philosophical truths which al- 
most exceed comprehension: and if they were only 
philosophical truths I would not occupy my time or 
yours in the effort to expound them. Even now some 
of you may be saying, Why not preach something 
quite plain and practical, which has a clear and 
cogent bearing on the daily life of a tired business 
man? But these are not merely philosophical truths 
■ — pray can you tell me of any truth that has so 
searching, cogent, and practical a bearing on the 
daily life of the tired man of business as this truth 
which assures him that he has a soul? For that is 
just what such a man is most apt to forget. Time 
governs all his thoughts — Time is money — Time 
seems a very real horizon imprisoning his energies, 
and he is apt to become the merest slave and drudge 
of Time. Who then needs so much to be told that 

100 



TIMELESSNESS 



the horizon is not real, that for the soul there is 
no such thing as Time, and that he has a soul 
fashioned after the image of God, and loved by God 
before the foundation of the world? Does it not 
alter all things to believe that? Can a man who be- 
lieves it drudge his life out to make money, without 
a single higher purpose: can he be prayerless, unde- 
vout, unthinking, grudging to God one poor hour of 
worship in a week and attending public worship more 
from habit than from instinct? And besides, have 
we not already seen that this tremendous thought of 
man's personal relation to God is the most powerful 
of all thoughts in shaping character : that it has con- 
vulsed and regenerated nations : that it has imposed on 
man a sense of responsibility which has had more to 
do with the shaping of civilisation than anything 
else : that it has produced literatures, launched armies, 
given stability to human government, and again and 
again, bred the hero of liberty and martyr of truth? 
We cannot ignore such facts. Tell a man Time is 
all he has, and dust all he is : and he will behave as the 
beasts that perish, and even worse than they. Tell 
him that he is the true child of the Eternal, and all 
life is altered to him. The horizon of Time has 
vanished, the heaven is opened to him, and all his life 
will be lived as in the sight of Him, whose he is, and 
whom he serves. 

" And, Lo, I am with you always even to the end 
of the world," says Christ in His sublime farewell 

101 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 

to His disciples. Once more see how all things fit in 
with these truths. For Christ thus proclaims Him- 
self from everlasting to everlasting. In this world 
to which He came for a season, He also moved within 
the horizon of Time — and He spake of His hour — 
" My hour is not yet come " : once beyond it He had 
reached the realm of the Timeless — no hours — no 
periods — it is / Am — and it is always. I have al- 
ready said that there are states of feeling which we 
all know, and which are outside the jurisdiction of 
Time. Jesus Himself has provided us with one sacred 
form of service, the very essence and meaning of 
which is that it takes us quite outside the limits of 
Time. At the table of the Lord we pass into Time- 
lessness by the force of faith and love. Our emotion 
annihilates the years and centuries, and we go back 
in the flash of an instant to that guest-chamber where 
the Redeemer sits, and says : " Do this in remem- 
brance of Me." Our faith does more: we feel the 
living embrace, we hear the living voice of Him who 
is alive for evermore, and we know Him with us in 
the breaking of bread. He who was slain before the 
foundation of the world loves us who existed, in the 
purpose of God, before the foundation of the world. 
Not only the horizon of Time, but the horizon of 
sense also has melted away — and there is a Real 
Presence indeed, and " Spirit with spirit can meet, 
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands 
and feet." Child of Time and earth, draw near, and 

102 



TIMELESSNESS 



know thyself for what thou art — the child of God, 
loved from the foundation of the world with an ever- 
lasting love. Know thy Saviour for what He is — 
slain for thee, and with thee in the undying life of 
the Spirit, always, to the end of the world. Know 
the Spirit of God the Comforter as thine: the breath 
of the Eternal perpetually breathed into thy spirit, 
and renewing it. And, knowing all this, join in the 
great Antiphon of faith and praise — love and adora- 
tion: 

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the 
Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now and 
ever shall be, world without end. Amen. 



108 



GOD'S POEMS 



VI 



GOD'S POEMS 

" For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto 
good works, which God hath before ordained that we should 
walk in them." — Eph. ii. 10. 

THE contention of Paul in this passage is that 
men and women are not the sole architects of 
their own characters — the Supreme Architect who 
works upon them is God. We are saved by grace 
— by a long series of Divine interpositions, by 
Heavenly compulsions and impulsions, by the energies 
of a ceaseless Hand that works upon us and brings 
out the Heavenly design, and completes the Divine 
symmetry. Is there any one of us who has not made 
that discovery? Are there not moments when the 
most self-reliant of us is made to feel that he is in 
the hand of God, that all our purposes in life and 
really noble efforts after completeness of character 
are touched with a humbling inefficiency — that, in 
fact, anything of goodness in us is not a rare plant 
that we have brought to birth, but the flower of a 
rare seed that an unseen hand has sown in us, and 
nurtured? It is easy, of course, to turn such a 
thought into folly. Human nature is, unfortunately, 

107 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



so constituted that very few minds are capable of 
seeing both sides of a truth. Thus it happens that 
those who cling most to the consoling thought of 
a gospel of pure grace often neglect the equally bind- 
ing gospel of a ceaseless struggle after goodness. 
And again, the good people who build up a life of 
flawless honour, integrity, and virtue, often find, 
because they have not learned to need it, a gospel 
of grace incomprehensible. Yet both are true, just 
as it is true that a ship depends for its movement 
equally on the men who work the pulleys and the 
wind that fills the sails. So we work out our own 
salvation; but we wait the Divine wind, that blows 
as it listeth, and we move to no heavenly shores till 
the wind comes out of the waste heaven, and God 
touches us. For it is by grace, by a Divine inter- 
ference, that we are saved; nor is there salvation 
possible without it. 

I do not often dwell upon this mystic side of re- 
ligion, because, as I conceive the spirit of modern 
life, few of us are able to bear it. We are tempted 
by so many tendencies of modern life to indifference 
in religion that our natural spiritual indolence would 
only be increased tenfold by the doctrine that salva- 
tion is all achieved for us. In the age of monas- 
ticism, when men and women were seeking to work 
out their salvation by endless acts of penance, charity, 
self-renunciation, and ritual obedience, it was a great 
spiritual discovery to tell men they were saved not 

108 



GOD'S P OEMS 



of themselves, but by the overwhelming interposition 
of God. Such a truth, as it was uttered by Luther, 
marked the hour of daybreak in Europe; as it was 
uttered later on by Wesley, resulted in the resurgence 
of all the deep springs of spiritual life which had 
been sealed for many generations in England. It 
was this supreme truth that converted both Luther 
and Wesley, and the one rose from Pilate's staircase 
in Rome with the dawn upon his brow, as a man 
enfranchised of a new world: the other in Aldersgate 
Street in half-an-hour cast the husk of twenty years 
of ritualism, and emerged into unbounded spiritual 
liberty. For us also to grasp this truth is life. Yet 
so ill-balanced and frail of judgment are we that 
there is only too much peril of wresting such a truth 
to our destruction. Rather for us the most nec- 
essary truth to-day is that goodness can only be 
found by effort, that the Kingdom of Heaven suf- 
fereth violence, that God will not save us by any 
spiritual necromancy, that if we are not prepared 
to be as earnest over religion as we are over our 
worldly affairs, there is no religion and no salvation 
for us. When men are seeking to be saved by a 
wrong method, yet are in deadly and consuming 
earnest over it, as men were when they left all to go 
on painful pilgrimages to the shrines of saints, it 
is time to say, 64 Poor soul, look up. You will never 
save yourself ; but Christ saves you, and all out of 
free grace." But when men take no count of re- 

109 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



ligion, beyond giving it two or three indolent hours 
on the Sunday: when they care far more for a rise 
in stocks or a turn in the market than for Heaven 
or Hell, it would be folly to foster their indifference 
by saying, " You need do nothing to be saved ; you 
are saved by grace." And it would be untrue to 
say it. There is much that we must do before we 
can hear the voice which assures us that there is a 
gospel of grace that makes good our deficiencies and 
does for us what we could not do for ourselves. It 
is only when we have fulfilled the gospel of works 
that we have any right to comfort ourselves with the 
gospel of grace, for it is only then that we can re- 
ceive it without injury, and rest in God for final 
salvation because we are co-workers with God in 
achieving our redemption. 

But the beauty and suggestiveness of this passage 
lies in the use of a single word which is altogether 
inadequately rendered in our version. Translators 
and scholars are seldom men of imagination, and 
when a fine word is given them, as is the case here, 
they usually fail to use it — fail for lack of imag- 
ination. We are His workmanship, His handicraft: 
it is a good enough word, but is not Paul's word. 
Paul's word is we are His Poems. Now what is a 
poem? It is the finest flower of the finest mind. It 
is only once or twice in a century that Nature is able 
to pro'duce the mind which has such a happy equi- 
poise of faculty that its expression ■ is poetry. It is 

110 



GOD'S POEMS 



only now and again that even a great poet produces 
a true poem, which enters into the mind and memory 
of the world. Biographers of Wordsworth have 
marked the exact period when his genius reached its 
height, and after that the glory came only at inter- 
vals, and the real poems were rare. And because a 
true poem is so rare a thing, it has always been ap- 
praised as the highest form of literature. Many 
great books come — and go, but a true poem is as 
fresh after long centuries as when it was first written. 
" Poesy never waxeth old," and knows no decay. It 
knows no decay because it is permeated with the spirit 
of beauty: because it is the enduring monument of 
a combination of fine gifts, whose final result is a 
thing of beauty and a joy for ever. That is what 
a poem is, and St. Paul says that we are the expres- 
sion of the mind of God, as the In Memoriam is the 
expression of the full mind and heart of Tennyson: 
We are God's Poems. 

But this very comparison opens another depth of 
thought. Suppose Paul had said — We are God's 
histories. That would have been equally true, for 
God has written Himself upon the tablets of empire 
and the fields of battle where human history is made. 
But there is this difference between a poem and a 
history : the one is the personal expression of a man's 
soul; the other is simply the work of a man's mind. 
The historian is not required to express himself ; on 
the contrary, he is required to leave himself out of 

111 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



the question, that he may write his history with an 
unbiassed vision. But the poem depends entirely upon 
the poet for its creation. It is the unveiling of the 
deepest and most intimate secrecies of his heart. 
His own image is projected over every page, and 
it is the poignant personal element in poetry that 
makes it so beautiful, and gives it its enduring 
charm. Men, then, are God's Poems. The intima- 
cies of God's heart are expressed in man : God's high- 
est thoughts, God's deepest emotions. The prayer 
of Moses was that the beauty of God might rest upon 
him ; when a man is finished at last in the likeness 
of Christ, God's sense of beauty is satisfied in him, 
God's art has found its finest expression and the 
beauty of God does rest upon him. The true Chris- 
tian is God's Poem in a world of prose; God's beauty 
in a world of gloom: God's fine and finished art, in 
a world where men forget beauty, and are careless 
of moral symmetry and spiritual grace. 

There are two directions in which we catch some 
glimpse of these truths: we can readily believe that 
little children are God's Poems, and that in the life 
which completes itself in moral unity, there is a touch 
of Divine poetry. Childhood is itself the poetry of 
life, and many a man whose soul has been thrilled 
with the charm of little children, has said with Long- 
fellow : — 

You are better than all the ballads 
That ever were sung or said, 
112 



GOD'S POEMS 



For you are the living poems 
And all the rest are dead. 

If God indeed looks down on earth and smiles, chil- 
dren are His smiles ; if He indeed is a Poet, these 
are His Poems. And so, also, when we see the rare 
spectacle of a life that from first to last is governed 
by high thoughts, moves on a high level, is held to- 
gether by a noble unity of design and effort, we can 
see that this life is like a gleam of noble poetry on 
the dull page of life. Look then at these things, 
and you will understand Paul's words — We are 
God's Poems. Christianity gives back to life its 
first fresh childlikeness, and says we must be as little 
children ; it gives the fine unity of the noblest aim to 
the life that obeys its mandate. Christ works out 
by His indwelling the image of true beauty in us, 
so that, at the last, we move through the throngs of 
men with a light that never was on sea or land upon 
us, a charm akin to; the exquisite and indefinable 
charm of poetry, for in truth we have become God's 
Poems, and are the thought of God interpreted in 
human forms. 

But not only in the child, and in the life that 
manifests a real and noble unity, do we gather the 
suggestion of this passage ; have we not also seen 
the concrete examples of what is meant in men and 
women we have known? When Carlyle describes 
Elizabeth Fry standing fair as a lily, in pure woman- 
liness, amid the abominable sights of old Newgate; 

113 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



or Longfellow describes Florence Nightingale moving 
with her lamp among the wounded at Scutari — 

And slow, as in a dream of bliss 
The speechless sufferer turns to kiss 
Her shadow, as it falls 
Along the darkening walls — 

what is the effect on the mind? It is the effect 
of poetry. We feel touched, purged, exalted: we 
know that these women were in truth God's Poems. 
And there are men and women in the world still who 
touch the soul by the same Divine magic. We feel 
better for having seen them ; the air is sweetened when 
they come; the mind finds joy in them, and the 
heart is rested. When a man like this enters the home 
of sorrow, the sunshine comes in with him ; when such 
a woman enters a room full of vain, worldly, and 
frivolous people, the range of thought is instantly 
raised, and the whole atmosphere of the room is 
purged and freshened. God's poetry has interrupted 
for a time the prose of life. We have felt as though 
a shining presence had been with us, and our poor 
sordid pleasure-seeking life has felt strangely mean 
to us. That is precisely the effect of poetry, it lifts 
us into a higher world; that also is the effect of the 
man or woman in whom Christ dwells — they make 
the poetry of life and move through the world to the 
sound of far-off music, that floats in wind-borne 
harmonies into the hearts of the least sensitive. 

114 



GOD'S POEMS 



There is no more difficulty in recognising these living 
poems than there is in feeling the difference between 
poetry and prose. Jesus Christ was God's great and 
perfect Poem, and He sets the standard of perfec- 
tion ; and as we are like Him, so do we reach a higher 
image and become the Poems of God. 

And bo we touch a yet deeper truth — the God 
who wrought the perfect Poem of Jesus Christ is 
still creating and finishing His Poems — not copies, 
mark you ; not mere echoes, but new Poems — com- 
plete and individual, though all conforming to the 
type of beauty Christ has given us. The usual, be- 
cause the easiest, way of preaching Christ is to preach 
Him as an example, and to tell men to copy Him. 
It is right as far as it goes, but it does not go far 
enough. We need to copy Christ, to compare our 
conduct with His, to measure our motive by His 
ideal; and even John Stuart Mill said there was no 
finer law of conduct than to ask how Christ would 
have acted and spoken in any difficult set of circum- 
stances which we may encounter. But does the man 
who copies Raphael become a Raphael? Does the 
man who moulds his music on the Tennysonian melody 
become a Tennyson? Where in art or letters do we 
find the copyist ever treated with respect? By what 
is art or poetry richer for the laborious copies of 
Raphael - or Rubens, or the slavish echoes of Eliza- 
bethan or Tennysonian poetry, which have filled the 
reams of unsold books, or acres of unmarketable can- 

115 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



vas? And neither is it the end of Christianity to 
fill the world with weak copies of Christ. The phon- 
ograph can retain the inflections of the human voice, 
and reproduce them, but after all it is not the human 
voice. To hear Bryan speak or Nordica sing is a 
very different thing from hearing the thin reduplica- 
tion and echo of their voices through the phonograph. 
It may be claimed that the echo is exact ; that inflec- 
tion by inflection, it utters the very words that elo- 
quent or lyric lips have uttered; but one word from 
the living lip is worth all that the phonograph can 
ever give us. No ; Christianity aims at nothing less 
than to make us new and living Christs in this world 
of the twentieth century, spreading the same influence, 
living in the same temper, ready to suffer and die 
in the same spirit as Jesus did centuries ago in Pales- 
tine. It claims not to make copies but creations. 
It claims not to stamp new patterns on old cloth, 
but to make all things new. It does not merely 
change a man, it transforms him into a new image. 
It produces not slavish echoes of the great poetry 
of Christ, but Poems — men and women in whom 
again God utters Himself, and expresses His infinite 
Art. 

Let us then gather up the practical lessons of the 
thought. 

And the first is that such a magnificent conception 
of what a man may be should be at once a restraint 

116 



GOD'S POE MS 



and impulse to us. Who can think meanly of life 
or of himself with such a phrase ringing in his mind? 
And the commonest temptation of life, especially in 
great cities, is not to think too highly of ourselves 
but too meanly. We are likelier to perish by 
despondence than by pride, by self -contempt than 
vanity. We are daily tempted by the very multitu- 
dinousness of life to think poorly of our own oppor- 
tunities, to tell ourselves that great ideals are not 
possible for such as we are, that the heights are out 
of reach, that for us the poetry of life is a closed 
book, a denied and forfeited delight. And when men 
think thus, what wonder is it that they act poorly? 
What marvel that they permit the growth of narrow- 
ness and poor-spiritedness in themselves, that they 
learn to do mean things and tread in sordid ways, 
that they cease to care anything for the dignity of 
life, and in mind and morals become slovenly and 
careless, till last of all they fall out of the range 
of the wisest and best voices, and hear them no more, 
nor regret their loss? It is in such hours we need 
to remind ourselves of the dignity of life, and that 
man was at first, and still may be, God's Poem. We 
all know how Carlyle vituperated at what he called 
Darwin's " gorilla damnifications of humanity," and 
ethically he was right. Man does not need to be told 
of the depth from which he has sprung, but of the 
height to which he may reach. He needs to hear less 
of the descent of man and more of the ascent of 

117 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



man through Jesus Christ. When you are tempted 
to let your ideals of youth slip out of sight, to give 
up the pursuit of excellence and turn from the dif- 
ficult path that leads to life, to take a poor mean- 
spirited view of life and live in accordance with it, 
here then is your sovereign remedy; look to Christ 
and see what He was, how He lived, what He is to 
the world to-day, and remember that you, too, may 
be a Poem of God, created in Christ Jesus unto good 
works. 

To do this will also help you to think well of all 
men. There are many men in the world who are illeg- 
ible poems — illegible to us who can see no element 
of God's poetry in them, yet not one of them is 
utterly without the faint outlines of God's intention 
visible in him. To us the early Saxon poetry is 
practically unintelligible; but when a scholar takes 
it up, and fits piece to; piece, and finds the sequence 
of thought and rhythm, it becomes at once noble 
poetry, the force and fulness of which all can feel. 
Let us think of our brother man in the same spirit. 
Nay, more, let us think of the world itself as a 
Poem that is still being written, and which will at 
the last be worthy of the art of God. Hope for our- 
selves; Hope for our brother man; Hope for the 
world; that is the true Christian spirit. Believe that 
God's will is being done; that He is still working in 
the world; that He must conquer; that every day 

118 



GOD'S POEMS 



is really bringing us nearer to the new earth wherein 
dwelleth righteousness. 

More than once in those long nights I spent on 
the Atlantic, I went on deck when all was still, and 
felt how insignificant a thing was man, in all that 
lonely immensity of sea and sky. There was no 
sound save the cry of the wind among the spars, the 
throb of the great engines, the sound of the many 
waters rushing round the vessel's keel. I felt the 
mystery of life ; I was conscious of " the whisper and 
moan and wonder and diapason of the sea." And 
then out of the stillness there came a voice, clear and 
ringing — the voice of the man on the look-out cry- 
ing to the night, " All's well, and the lights burn 
bright ! All's well, and the lights burn bright ! 99 
How did I know all was well? What knew I of the 
forces that were bridled in the mysterious throbbing 
heart of those unceasing engines, of the peril that 
glared on me in the breaking wave, or lay hidden 
in the dark cloud that lay along the horizon ? I 
knew nothing; but the voice went sounding on over 
the sea : "All's well, and the lights burn bright ! " 
And the wind carried it away across the waters, and 
it palpitated round the world, and it went up soaring 
and trembling, in ever fainter reverberations, among 
the stars. So I stand for a little while amid great 
forces -of which I know little; but I am not alone 
in the empty night. The world moves on to some 
appointed goal, though by what paths I know not; 

119 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



it has its Steersman, and it will arrive. And, amid 
the loneliness and mystery, the peril and uncertainty, 
I have learned to hear a Voice that cries, " All's 
well ! " and tells me why all is well ; it is the Voice of 
Christ saying, " Lo, I am with you always, even to 
the end of the world." God has not left His world. 
He is working out His supreme Art in it every day, 
and if we be true Christians we are God's Poems 
wrought in Christ Jesus unto good works. 



120 



ELIJAH'S LONELINESS 



VII 



ELIJAH'S LONELINESS 

"And he said, I have been very jealous for the Lord God of 
"hosts: for the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, 
thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the 
sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life to 
take it away." — I Kings xix. 10. 

IN the lives of all great men there come hours 
of spiritual crisis, which are often inexplicable 
in their origin and tragic in their results. Brave 
men are swept away by sudden tides of cowardice, 
heroic men know the ignominy of fear and the agony 
of despondence. No character is built upon quite 
simple lines : often it is the coherence of antagonistic 
tendencies — as we see in John, who was the apostle 
of love and yet is the very type of intolerance ; of 
Peter, who is the bravest of the brave, and yet was 
thrice a coward and a liar. We are all conscious, 
if we take any care to observe ourselves, of sudden 
lowerings of spiritual temperature, of nameless move- 
ments in our own hearts, out of which, as out of the 
stirring of a wind, comes a gray cloud that spreads 
itself over the firmament of life. It is such an hour 
in the life of Elijah. The passion and excitement 

123 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



of the great scene on Carmel have passed away. The 
re-action is upon him. He is fugitive and foodless, 
and the faintness of despair spreads itself through 
his heart. He magnifies his own sensations till every 
detail stands out in gigantic emphasis: he is alone 
on the side of right, and the whole world is leagued 
against him. Do not we in the same manner, in our 
hours of despondence, set out all our feelings, our 
failures, our broken ambitions in the same gigantic 
array, till we persuade ourselves that none have drunk 
as bitter cups as we, none have been so hardly used, 
so little valued, so unjustly scorned! We even per- 
suade ourselves that death is sweet, and with a bitter 
daring we call on the last hour to come and put an 
end to us. The keynote of such a condition is an 
exaggerated egoism : it is only in such hours of hurt 
vanity, and wounded pride, that we cry — " O Lord, 
take away my life, for I am not better than my 
fathers." 

But if we look a little closer we shall see that there 
is something more than hurt egoism here, and some- 
thing deeper. What is this sorrow that weighs so 
heavily on so great a heart as Elijah's, that he calls 
for the angel of the last hour to give him ease? It 
is the sorrow of an overwhelming loneliness, it is such 
a loneliness as Shelley has pictured in immortal verse : 

Alas, I have nor hope, nor health, 
Nor peace within, nor calm around, 
Nor that content surpassing wealth, 
124* 



ELIJAH'S LONELINESS 



The sage in meditation found, 

And walked with inward glory crowned. 

Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure, 

Others I see whom these surround, 

Smiling they live, and call life pleasure, 

To me that cup has been dealt in another measure ; 

I could lie down like a tired child, 

And weep away the life of care, 

Which I have borne, and yet must bear. 

It is the sense that no one sympathises with our deep- 
est thoughts, that our ideals are not the ideals of the 
world, that our best actions are misconstrued, our 
best gifts fail equally of recognition and reward. 
Life is not dealt in this measure to others — this is 
the bitterness of it. Ahab and Jezebel and the care- 
less and sensual crowd who gather in the flower- 
decked temples of Baal find a joy in life which is 
denied to you. Thousands of people pass you in 
the street who find restfulness even in the dulness of 
their lives, because they have no aims beyond the 
satisfaction of the meanest desires. You would fain 
do great things for the world, and you can do noth- 
ing. You follow the gleam of a vision others do not 
see; or hear of, only to deride. You do not even 
gain the vision yourself — it is but a troublous 
glimpse, as of a star swimming for an instant into 
a little lake of blue between heavy clouds. What is 
the use of trying? O Lord, take away my life, for 
I am not better than my fathers I Every man who 

125 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



aspires after high things feels thus: if we have not 
felt it, it is because we have never known such aspi- 
ration. 

Loneliness is the commonest of all human miseries, 
and if we are to understand this phase of Elijah's 
life, and the cure of it, let us begin by admitting this 
fact. In the plainest sense of the word we are lonely, 
and cannot be otherwise. Those who know and love 
us best know not half the reasons why we sigh or 
smile. Men and women may live together in what 
seems the closest intimacy for years, and yet keep 
within their hearts reserved and barriered chambers 
to which neither has the key. Children may grow up 
in a home, and yet be utterly alien in the deeper 
things of the spirit. Our life may be spent among 
orowds, and yet the vast silence which encloses the 
heart may never once be broken. For many of us 
the effort to explain ourselves is impossible; when we 
would fain speak a fatal reticence seals our lips, and 
the golden hour passes and never comes again. For 
others among us the golden hour never strikes. As 
life passes out of that season when confidences are 
most easily exchanged, we are more and more driven 
back upon ourselves. It pains us to see the ease 
with which others seem to find an apparent unity of 
life, because for us it seems always out of reach. 
Have we not all felt how true this is? Do I, who am 
your friend and minister, know your lives — your 
real inward lives — in any but the most superficial 

126 



ELIJAH'S LONELINESS 



way? Do you know mine? Is not every word of 
comfort or counsel uttered from the pulpit a bow 
drawn at a venture, for who can tell where is the 
heart to whom it appeals ? Like ships at sea we meet 
and pass and exchange greeting — and then sail out 
again upon the lonely waters — nor can all the ships 
upon the sea ever make those waters other than a 
far-stretched loneliness. Far away we sail, meeting 
for a moment, and then dipping downward toward 
opposite horizons, and unplumbed seas roll between 
us. This is one of the conditions of life — keenly 
felt by some, less keenly by others — but in some 
degree even by the most thoughtless, and perhaps 
most keenly by those of whom we suspect it least. 

Now with Elijah this loneliness has two forms: it 
is the loneliness of being misunderstood — and equally 
of misunderstanding. He has the consciousness of 
having acted rightly, nobly, heroically — and of 
having failed. He knows himself to possess the only 
true clue of life. Far from the false and fevered 
life of courts and cities, he has nourished his soul in 
strenuous simplicity of thought and righteousness of 
conduct. He would fain have all Israel in corre- 
spondence with his ideal. He is absolutely sure that 
the one path of national happiness is that to which 
he points, and he cannot understand that what is so 
obvious .to him, should be so incomprehensible to 
others. Every man who aims at the reform of so- 
ciety has to endure this bitterness. The youth who 

127 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



tries to live a life of chivalry and purity in the office: 
the merchant who cares more for honour than for 
gain: the statesman who is determined to steer a 
straight course in opposition to the casuistries of 
party interest: the social reformer who has mastered 
the right principles of social betterment, and is de- 
termined to apply them — all feel this pain of being 
misunderstood. It amazes and hurts them beyond 
measure to find that the world not merely does not 
believe in their ideals, but believes still less in their 
own purity of aim. The higher they climb the deeper 
is the loneliness which encompasses them, and it is 
with a shock that they discover that few or none 
follow them, till at the foot of some last inaccessible 
summit, on which a desolate and unanswering serenity 
dwells, they fall and cry — " Lord, take away my 
life ; what am I better than my fathers? 99 

But this loneliness is equally the loneliness of mis- 
understanding. Elijah completely underrates his own 
work and influence. He says that he alone serves 
the Lord — it is not true. There are seven thousand 
quiet and unknown souls who serve Him too, and who 
have not bowed to Baal. The influence of a man like 
Elijah travels in the atmosphere. His words are 
flashed by a sudden spiritual telepathy upon a thou- 
sand ears, of which he knows nothing. You can 
count heads, you can tabulate numbers, but you can- 
not reckon influences. The lifting of a hand, the 
breathing of a word, reports itself on waves of im- 

128 



ELIJAH'S LONELINESS 



perceptible vibration to the furthest stars, and caijf 
a moral influence like Elijah's fail to touch menr 
Here and there a man says to the speaker of a truth, 
or the writer of a book, Sir, you have blessed me: 
but how many have received the same message and 
the same blessing and said nothing? Is it not true 
that the men who have seemed to fail have often been 
the only men in a generation who have really suc- 
ceeded? John Keats, dying young, poor, and derided 
in Rome, thought that he had failed, and said his 
name was written in water : we know that it was writ- 
ten in adamant, and that he ranks with the immortals. 
Robertson of Brighton, dying in the prime of man- 
hood, after a relatively obscure and bitterly mis- 
understood ministry, seemed to have failed: we know 
to-day that his sermons have touched the very springs 
of modern life, and have affected the teaching of the 
pulpit as perhaps no others ever have. Years after 
the death of Robertson, a Brighton tradesman said 
that whenever he was tempted to any underhand trick 
or lying compromise in business, he went into the 
little room behind his shop, and looked at Robertson's 
portrait and then felt he could not do it. Can any 
man be said to have failed who can produce this feel- 
ing in another man? The fact is, truth and good- 
ness never fail, and there is more truth and goodness 
in the world than we suppose. The best influences 
of a good man's life are never known to him: if 
they were he could not say, " I, even I only, am left 

129 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



a prophet of the Lord," for his ears would be filled 
with the march music of that innumerable army who 
throughout the world fear God and work righteous- 
ness, and are his faithful comrades and eternal broth- 
ers in arms. 

Elijah was presently to learn this lesson, but be- 
fore he learned it he was to pass through a great 
experience. At this point all that we see is this 
gaunt and tragic figure in the desert — the strong 
man weak, the hero unmanned, lonely with so vast 
a loneliness that his mouth is full of reproach, his 
heart of bitterness. What was that experience? In 
what way did he discover the cure of loneliness? 
God calls him forth to look upon a great and ter- 
rible sight, and through the symbols of that vision 
we may find our way to the cure, as Eli j ah did. Now 
the essence of this vision is that it is a series of pro- 
posed cures for loneliness, each of which fails, until 
we reach the last. 

First of all, freedom is suggested as a cure for 
loneliness. As Elijah stands in the mouth of the 
cave, and looks out, a great and strong wind rises 
and rends the mountains: and this we may take as 
the symbol of freedom. The mighty wind that beats 
over land and sea breathes the very spirit of liberty. 
It calls to the lonely man, and says, " Come, share 
the liberty of my life: travel forth with me: go out 
on your world-wandering with me: and in the thrill 
of speed and movement all loneliness of soul will be 

130 



ELIJAH'S LONELINESS 



charmed away." That cry rings through all the 
movements of our time. Men who are lonely because 
they cannot find God, because truth eludes them, be- 
cause impracticable ideals torture them, are told to 
claim the freedom of the earth, and leave a diseased 
society to heal itself. 

The days are dark and cold, and the skies are gray 
and old, 

And the twice-breathed air blows damp: 

You have heard the beat of the off-shore wind, 

And the thresh of the deep sea rain, 

You have heard the song, how. long, how long, 

Put out on the trail again. 

And who that is not wholly deadened in heart does 
not sometimes thrill to the appeal? Why toil for a 
society that does not seek to understand you, and will 
not love you? Life is short, and the joy of life is 
shorter than life. In a few years the stiffness and 
rigidity of age will creep over thought and impulse, 
and the days will come when we say we have no 
pleasure in them. So the wind thunders by, and calls 
to the lonely man, and it is as though all the trumpets 
of liberty blew, and the hard task drops from the 
hands at the sound, and the man in the cave's mouth 
stretches forward, as though he would beat out his 
way into that primeval freedom where there is no 
quest of truth, no burden of duty, no torturing ideals 
— but one thought arrests him — God is not in the 

131 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



wind. Liberty without God, what cure is there in 
that for the soul of man? No, let the wind thunder 
past, until at last it dies away, far off in the hollows 
of the night — there is no cure here — for God is not 
in the wind. 

This truth is clear and manifest enough, if we 
think of it, but how slow we are to learn it. For 
does it not all lie in this, that we cannot fly from 
ourselves? Merlin, as he wanders in the enchanted 
forest of the Arthurian legend, is free — in a sense, 
indeed: but in no real sense. And why? Because 
" he is crushed and haunted, and vexed for ever by 
dim, unappeasable shadows of doom — whispers of 
the inexpiable, the irretrievable, the gone, the lost, 
the harvest passed, the summer ended ! " In other 
words, he is haunted by himself. No man ever yet 
found anything but sorrow in flying from a duty. 
Emigration is no cure for heartache. We have to 
live with ourselves, whatever stars shine over us, and 
the man who lives with a dishonoured self, lives with 
misery. No: such revolt as this is no gain. The 
man in the cave's mouth may well draw his mantle 
over his head and turn away, for God is not in the 
wind. 

And after the wind there came an earthquake — 
of what is this the symbol? May it not stand for 
that violence of action, that whirl of things, which 
always attracts the lonely man and promises to cure 
his grief? The kingdoms of the earth are always 

132 



ELIJAH'S LONELINESS 

being shaken, social edifices are falling, shocks and 
changes are running through the nations, and amid 
the confusion there is an endless opportunity for 
ambition. The earthquake is even now shaking the 
throne of Ahab, and why should not a man of 
Elijah's force and courage seize that throne? The 
shaking of the old kingdoms always gives a chance 
to the ambitious man: it is the opportunity of Na- 
poleon, and on the ruins of the earthquake which 
overwhelmed Europe, he builds his power. And for 
us, in lesser measure, the same vision is set. We can 
give up troublesome ideals and live for self. Amid 
the crash of other people's fortunes we can seize the 
chance to make our own. We need not even be 
sordid or meanly ambitious: we may find our lure in 
the power that comes to ability, amid the shiftings 
and uncertainties of society. Again the man in the 
cave's mouth looks out, and sees the shock run along 
the hills and shatter them, and feels the vast vibration 
like a wave beneath his feet, that lifts him onward 
and outward to a great career of power, of pride, 
of fame, but once more the thought arrests him — 
God is not in the earthquake. Such a life might fill 
the heart with noise; never with peace. It might 
drown thought, it could not uplift it. It might 
drive loneliness away in its merely superficial forms, 
but it would leave the heart emptier, lonelier, more 
isolated than ever. The seismic wave subsides be- 
neath his feet, and once more he draws his mantle 

133 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



over his brows, and says, No. Here also is no cure 
— God is not in the earthquake. 

And after the earthquake came a fire: the storm 
followed, and the live lightning leapt from crag to 
crag, and the whole body of the heavens became 
a mass of flame and splendour. It was the spec- 
tacle of the greatness and grandeur of Nature. 
Who is Elijah, who and what is any man in the 
presence of that elemental majesty? How small 
and vain all our poor earthly contentions seem 
when the silence of the stars, the diapason of the 
thunder, the rush of the tempest fills our imagi- 
nation! We ask our little questions but there is 
no reply; there is even the suspicion of ghostly 
laughter in that hollow whisper of the night, of 
contempt in that tremendous voice of the thunder. 
In that vast battle of the heavens, man and all his 
petty armaments are overwhelmed; Ahab and Elijah 
are forgotten, Baal and Jezebel are words without 
significance. And this also we have felt, and to 
the man of grieved and lonely heart, Nature is 
proposed to-day, as she has always been, as the 
great mother who alone can heal us. Yet when 
have we ever found it so? To the finer sense there 
is indeed a species of communion with Nature, but 
it is loneliness answering loneliness not healing it. 
Wordsworth, more than any other man, sought that 
communion and found it, but even with him the 
cure was only partial, but he tells us — 

134 



ELIJAH'S LONELINESS 



Me, this unchartered freedom tires, 
I feel the weight of chance desires. 

Byron sought it, when he fled from the devastating 
passions of London to the icy stillness of the Alps, 
but of him it is said — 

No hush fell on him, where the might 
Of snow-capped peaks in solitude 
Taught greater souls serenity: 
Ah, vain his flight who flees from good, 
Until man from himself can fly 
What ease comes to him in his flight? 

If indeed Nature can cure the lonely heart, why 
was not Elijah cured, for in the desert he was alone 
with Nature in its wildest forms of beauty and deso- 
lation? Yet can we not fancy this man once more 
bending forth from the cave's mouth, thrilled and 
dazzled by the splendour of the storm, thinking 
within himself that here in this cave he may find 
a rest — that here he can dwell content and secure 
in the lap of Nature, and share her calm, and 
rejoice in her terrors, and leave Ahab and all the 
vain world forevermore alone? But again the 
thought arrests him — God is not in the storm. No, 
man wants something more than beauty and mag- 
nificence to fill his heart. He needs duties, love, 
truth — L the certainty and the manifestation of God; 
and the heavens burn in yet more blinding splendour, 



135 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



and the thunder rolls in yet nearer magnificence — 
but God is not m the fire! 

And then at last a thing strange and wonderful 
happened — the wind, the earthquake, the thunder 
all pass, and a thrilling silence fills the desert. 
Earth and sky are hushed into deepest calm, ex- 
hausted by the passage of so much terror and 
confusion, and there is no sound save the faint breath- 
ing of the man in the cave's mouth, who still gazes 
into the void. And after the fire came a still, small 
voice — and at that voice the soul of the man 
thrilled, for it was the voice of God. " What doest 
thou here, Elijah? " It was the voice of rebuke, and 
of just rebuke. It is not here that loneliness can be 
cured — God is the one cure for the lonely heart. 
Liberty, ambition, beauty, take them all — for all are 
worthless. God made man for Himself, and for man 
there is no rest till he finds rest in God. So said St. 
Augustine many centuries ago ; and, in our own day, 
has not Thomas Carlyle, who like Elijah sought com- 
fort in the wind, and the earthquake, and the fire, also 
told us in his last letters, that the longer he lived, 
the more his heart went out to the truth of that say- 
ing he learned as a boy in the Scotch Catechism — 
" What is the chief duty of man ? It is to know 
God and to enjoy Him forever." A voice — it is 
only one who lives who can speak — and Nature is 
dead and dumb. A still voice — it comes from the 
calm of eternity and breathes tranquillity through 

136 



ELIJAH'S LONELINESS 



the soul. A small voice — no thunder this, but a 
voice demanding silence in the soul — the hearing 
ear, the attentive heart — 

So through the thunder comes a human voice 
Saying, O heart I made, a heart beats here, 
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself, 
Thou hast no power, nor may conceive of mine, 
But love I gave thee, with myself to love, 
And thou must love me who have died for thee ! 

And at that voice Elijah goes forth from the cave, 
and his heart is healed — for who can be lonely when 
God talks with him, or call himself forsaken when 
God consoles him? 

I speak especially to lonely men and women, to 
those who cannot speak their deepest thoughts, or 
have none to whom they dare confide them; to those 
on whom the loneliness of great cities themselves 
weighs like a cloud, or those who know the loneli- 
ness of the house where death has been, or where 
poverty abides — and I point you to the one cure. 
Who can be lonely if Christ indeed be in the world, 
a spiritual comforter forevermore? Who can be un- 
comraded when the hospitable heart of God stands 
open to him? "I am alone, yet not alone," said 
Christ, for He dwelt in God and God in Him. Nor 
are these mere echoes of vague and transcendental 
truths. Upon the lips of the sick, of the life-long 
martyrs who know the pain without the palm, of the 

137 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 

men and women who lie through long hours in soli- 
tary rooms, with their life slowly draining from 
them, how often have I heard the words — " Alone, 
ah! yes sir — but never lonely — for Christ is with 
me all the time ! " How often have I seen upon the 
faces of the aged and the dying that quiet light, as 
though they saw a glory I could not perceive, and 
heard a voice inaudible to me. We also may find 
that joy of theirs, for we may hear the still, small 
voice. Lonely life must always be for many of us, 
and to others of us whose lives are crowded now, 
lonely hours come later, when the buoyancy of im- 
pulse and the power of executing puirpose ebbs, 
when the house is empty and the children we have 
loved and toiled for are scattered through the earth; 
and for all of us there must needs come that last 
loneliness of death. But even then there is a voice 
that says, " I am with you alway," and it has been 
in the power of myriads of men and women to reply 
in that solemn hour, " Yea will I not fear." This 
is our hope, in God. This is our source of strength, 
that we live unto God, and not unto man. This 
is our final peace and satisfaction, that he who lives 
in God shares a fellowship with the eternal, which 
conquers the monotonies and depressions of time, 
and finds its fruition in the life that lasts when all 
earthly things have passed away. O tired and lonely 
heart, turn away from all vain dreams of cure in 
change of earthly state; bow thyself in the deep 

138 



ELIJAH'S LONELINESS 

hush of this hour of prayer, and you shall hear the 
still, Divine voice which says, " My peace I give unto 
you, not as the world gives, give I unto you. Be of 
good cheer, I have overcome the world." 



189 



THE GREATNESS OF MEN SEEN IN 
HUMAN PROGRESS 



VIII 



THE GREATNESS OF MEN SEEN IN 
HUMAN PROGRESS 

" We have not wrought any deliverance in the earth ; neither 
have the inhabitants of the world fallen." — Isaiah xxvi. 18. 

THIS passage may be taken as a pathetic and 
half ironical statement of the futility of human 
life. It is equivalent to saying " we expected to do 
great things with our life, and we have not done 
them," and this is a lamentable but common con- 
fession among men. Few men accomplish the dream 
of their youth, and in proportion as these dreams are 
high and vast, the probability of accomplishment be- 
comes more and more remote. It is a catholic ex- 
perience in life to discover that as we grow older 
hope takes a more sober hue, and ambitions moderate 
themselves; the conquest that once seemed so easy 
appears more and more difficult; the prize that 
seemed within our grasp eludes us, and recedes 
further from us with each narrowing period of life. 
Beyond all this, there are sudden checks which hap- 
pen in prosperous careers; inexplicable misfortunes, 
reverses, and defeats; strange, and as it seems to us, 

143 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



unjust operations of blind circumstance, which sud- 
denly deprive us of the triumph which we have had 
every reason to anticipate. All men know something 
of these experiences before they are done with life, 
and they are the bitterest experiences that man can 
know. Some take them with cynical indifference, 
some with philosophic acquiescence in the strange 
ways of destiny, some with vociferous complaint; but 
behind all our moods there exists a poignant sense of 
the futility of life, a sense of the uselessness and 
even the irony of high purposes in a world like this. 
It is this feeling that finds its expression in the say- 
ing of this ancient Hebrew poet — " We have not 
wrought any deliverance in the earth." 

But a moment's thought will show you that much 
more than this lies behind this saying. It is in reality 
not the exposition of the humiliation of man, but of 
his undying greatness. For why should man expect 
to work any deliverance in the earth? For whom is 
that deliverance to be wrought? Whence comes the 
instinct which prompts the aim of such deliverance? 
What other creature is there capable of such an aspi- 
ration? We know of none. So far as we can see, 
man alone knows the torture of such a thought, and 
man alone is capable of that combined and corporate 
activity, which suggests to him the great hope ex- 
pressed in the word deliverance. And this fact about 
man has been noted and commented upon from the 
very first. Three great allegories stand in the back- 

144 



THE GREATNESS OF MEN 

ground of all human thought, each one of which helps 
to express man's sense of his own importance in the 
universe. The Eden-story of Genesis represents man 
as becoming as the gods, by his knowledge of good 
and evil ; that is to say by his pc ., er of moral choice, 
which makes his life an undying struggle in pursuit of 
moral aims. The Greek story of man stealing the fire 
of the gods, is but a variation of the same allegory — 
the sublime statement of man's power to scale the 
heavens. And again, the story of Prometheus chained 
to the rock, eternally agonised, but eternally un- 
conquered by his agony, is the allegory of man's 
power to resist and overcome the direst hostility of 
fate and circumstance. Combine these thoughts into 
one truth, and you have this result: that man feels 
himself placed upon the earth as the agent of divine 
purposes that go beyond himself. He feels himself 
ordained and predestined to work out some deliverance 
for himself and others — intellectual, moral, spir- 
itual, and social deliverance; and his true life lies in 
this, and nothing else. " No one is unhappy at not 
being a King except a dethroned King," says Pascal, 
or we may add, who feels himself to be capable of 
Kingship ; and no one mourns that he has wrought no 
deliverance in the earth, except a creature who re- 
alizes that it was his duty, his privilege, and the very 
mission of his life to accomplish such a deliverance. 
Thus, then, so far from being a melancholy statement 
of the futility of human life, this passage is the very 

145 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



opposite: it is the statement of the greatness of man 
as seen in human progress. 

First of all, let us look at this statement of the 
greatness of man. It is manifest that if it be true, 
it is the most important of all statements, because it 
is capable of the most far-reaching consequences on 
human character and destiny. Conceive to yourself 
two children born into the world, one of whom is told 
from his birth that he is a creature of no importance : 
the other of whom is daily stimulated and encouraged 
by the great records of human achievement, and is 
told to emulate them. Conceive further two condi- 
tions of society, in one of which it is impressed on 
men that human existence is a malady and a misfor- 
tune, in the other of which, the glory, the joy, and 
the triumph of living are constantly expressed. Con- 
ceive yet again, two religions: the one teaching the 
utter misery of existence, the other teaching that 
man is but a little lower than the angels, and the ex- 
press and permanent image of the unseen God who 
rules the universe. No one needs to be told what the 
effect these differing conceptions will be upon the 
human mind. There are families which through long 
centuries have bred heroic and chivalrous men and 
women, because self -reverence, honour and heroism 
were traditions in them. There are countries that 
have nourished great races because from father to son 
through many generations great and dignified ideals 
of religion and moral responsibility have been handed 

146 



THE GREATNESS OF MEN 



down untarnished. But the Bayard of perfect cour- 
tesy and chivalry rarely comes to growth in the 
foul slums of great cities where everything ex- 
presses the meanness of existence: the great deeds 
of human progress are never found among nations 
governed by pessimistic ideals of philosophy and re- 
ligion. So then we see that what a man becomes 
depends largely on the estimate he forms of himself. 
The sense of human greatness makes men great: 
the sense of human littleness lessens them, and at 
last not only dwarfs but distorts and deforms them. 
He who preaches the total and unalleviated depravity 
of human nature not merely utters a psychological 
absurdity, but perpetrates a crime upon society, and 
an outrage on the cause of morals. And such a 
dogma receives no support from the religion of the 
Bible, which above all things states the dignity of 
man, his greatness, and his possibilities of growing 
greatness, likening him to God whose offspring he is, 
and bidding him be perfect even as the Father in 
heaven is perfect. The Bible may be right or wrong 
in such magnificent assertions — that is not in dis- 
cussion with us for the moment — but no one can 
doubt that it does state from first to last, in matchless 
splendour of phrase and with unqualified boldness of 
language, the truth that man is great; and only a 
creature conscious of his greatness could utter the 
sublime lament that he had wrought no deliverance in 
the earth. 

14^ 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



But is the Bible mistaken in these assertions, and 
is this passage after all but another example of that 
exalted egotism of which man has always been ab- 
surdly capable? 

There are certainly three directions in which the 
least competent observer may discover reasons to 
doubt this assertion of the greatness of man. Com- 
pare man with physical nature, for example, and at 
first sight it is the insignificance and not the greatness 
of man that is apparent. But it is only at first sight. 
Mountains are great, but man can pierce them : seas 
are great, but man can traverse them: the storm- 
cloud is great, but man can pluck from its bosom the 
winged fire on which thoughts travel round the world. 
The whole thing is a fallacy, and the key to the 
fallacy is that magnitude is not greatness. What is 
mere bulk in comparison with thought and conscious- 
ness? What is the utmost majesty of matter in 
comparison with the magnificence of that spirit which 
gives to a man wisdom and understanding? We feel 
the Alps that tower above the St. Gothard to be great, 
but it is only in the sense of magnitude ; when we see 
the engine man has fashioned slowly climbing up the 
mountain side, impelled by a mere handful of fire 
within its iron entrails ; when we see it vanish in the 
bowels of the earth, and presently come forth again, 
having threaded with resistless energy and in complete 
triumph and security, the very roots of the everlast- 
ing hills — then we feel that we are in the presence of 

148 



THE GREATNESS OF MEN 



quite another sort of greatness — a greatness not of 
magnitude but of power. And as a matter of plainest 
fact the physical universe has no greatness except as 
it exists in the human mind. Pascal put the truth 
long since when he said, " If the universe were to fall 
and crush me, I should be greater than the universe, 
for I should be conscious of defeat, and it would be 
unconscious of victory." It is easy enough I grant 
to feel our insignificance as compared with nature, 
but the feeling is irrational, and quite illusory. Do 
not be misled by what poets have to say on such a 
theme. Do not mistake their expression of a natural 
emotion for the statement of a fact. God is great, 
and man is great, but elsewhere there is no greatness 
— and it is the authentic miracle and dignity of man 
as a creature truly God-like that we most need to 
learn if we are to live in such a way as to work out 
any deliverance upon the earth. 

We may find reason to doubt the greatness of man, 
again, when we compare the total action of man with 
his aspiration. The aspiration is magnificent, but 
what of its fruit? Who attains a tenth part of that 
which he desires to attain : with whom is the efficiency 
of the accomplished action equal to the impulse that 
wrought it ? Yes : but that very aspiration itself is a 
sort of greatness. To will great things is only less 
great than to accomplish them. The triumph of the 
individual man lies not only in that which he does, 
but in the great schemes and hopes which he desired to 

149 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



perfect, and which he bequeaths to the race, as the 
leaven of moral energy which shall work to its ful- 
filment long after he is dead. 

And, in the third place, the greatness of man ap- 
pears an empty phrase, when we compare man with 
himself. Think of the ineffectual lives that are lived 
upon the earth. Think of the lives distinguished by 
no lofty ideals, and abounding in every mean variety 
of motive. Think of the useless or noxious lives that 
spoil society : the hosts of men who never know a 
higher impulse than self-interest: the youths who 
spend the freshness of their manhood in idle sport 
and empty pleasure: the women who have no view 
of things outside the cloistered walls of decent do- 
mesticity — the people, for whom such terms as so- 
ciety, the commonwealth, the community, the nation, 
the world, have not the least significance, and for 
whom this passage is in consequence the merest 
tinkling of a cymbal, and a meaningless exuberance 
of rhetoric. But it is precisely at this point that 
the higher message of the text discloses itself. Let 
the individual be what he will, there is a general 
movement in society which makes for progress. You 
may not seek to work out any deliverance in the 
earth, but there are those who do so seek. A ceaseless 
impulse runs through men, coming we know not 
whither, and it impels them forward, ever forward. 
In spite of human apathy laws do get mended, reforms 
are accomplished, programmes once discredited trans- 

150 



THE GREATNESS OF MEN 



form themselves to facts. Some stand aloof, some 
are swept onward by the tide : but the tide never ebbs. 
Some smile in ignorant scorn, as doubtless the Swiss 
peasants did, when the first company of Engineers 
attacked the frowning bastions of the St. Gothard: 
but the day comes when the engine climbs the heights, 
and the iron rails bind two separated lands together; 
and then the dullest know that something has hap- 
pened by which the whole world reaps benefit. You 
may not see the greatness of man as he stands against 
the immutable magnificence of nature: you may not 
see it in the individual or in yourself, but you do see 
it in human progress, and he who has once seen that 
vision will not be content to die until he has contrib- 
uted his mite of energy to the sum of " things for- 
ever working," and has helped to work some 
deliverance in the earth. 

And now let us go a little further and ask what is 
Progress? Progress is not wealth, though it is a 
common assumption that when you have proved a 
nation to be richer by the passage of the years you 
have proved that it has progressed. Progress is not 
personal success in life, though for multitudes that 
is the only meaning which the word conveys. There 
is such a thing, as Carlyle ironically reminded us, 
as progress downward. No: we must seek a higher 
and completer definition of the word — and we find 
it in this passage — Progress is deliverance. When 
a nation is delivered from ignorance by the universal 

151 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 

establishment of free or cheap education — that is 
progress. When a nation is delivered from the 
tyranny of Kings, and the worse tyranny of landed 
and hereditary oligarchies — that is progress. When 
children are delivered from the pressure of inhuman 
factory laws : when fair wages and wise consideration 
bind masters and men together in honourable inter- 
course and self-respecting friendship: when churches 
are delivered from their theological animosities and 
arrogant assumptions, and are united in common 
effort for the common good; when men of all ranks 
have a common reverence for just ideals of govern- 
ment, and none are for a party and all are for the 
state : when virtue thrives, and vice is everywhere dis- 
credited, and the causes that produce vice are every- 
where diminished by social service, wise statesmanship, 
and loyal love of good — that is progress. And 
every age presents some special opportunity of 
progress. Luther, Cromwell, Wesley, Lincoln — 
each is a name that tells its own tale of progress. 
Resolve progress into its elements, and what is it 
then but this: a long series of deliverances by which 
society grows freer, purer, and stronger: battles that 
begin obscurely in the convictions of single men, 
and end by becoming vast campaigns conducted by 
entire nations : struggles to attain, at first on the part 
of the enlightened few, but later on communicating 
their passion and their fervour to multitudes ; deliver- 
ance upon deliverance, and each a stepping stone by 

152 



THE GREATNESS OF MEN 



which the world advances to its golden age. Yes: 
that is progress : that and nothing else. To live thus 
is indeed to prove that man can be great. Progress 
thus interpreted is indeed a Divine thing — the wit- 
ness of God's government as of man's greatness. 
And to the man who once feels the fervour of this 
vision no disaster can be so great, no lamentation 
so poignant, as to be forced into confession as he 
leaves the world behind him, " Alas, I have mis- 
interpreted the meaning of life, I have spent my 
money for that which is not bread, I have bartered 
my life for that which satisfieth not, I have wrought 
no deliverance in the earth ! " 

And of all certain things this is perhaps the most 
certain: that ideals such as these have most fascina- 
tion for us when we are young, most power to move 
us, and are most likely to become permanent forces 
in our life. We believe in man then : we believe in the 
regeneration of society, and the promise of a golden 
age. You will find that in almost every case of a 
brave spirit struggling for the redemption of society 
from some form of deadly intellectual error, of po- 
litical injustice or religious bondage, the struggle 
began early, in the days of youth. Later on belief 
in man becomes more difficult, and our sense of the 
obstacles to human progress is apt to become over- 
whelming. And therefore I say that this subject is 
of incomparable and paramount importance to youth. 
Do you really desire to work out any deliverance upon 

153 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



the earth? Have you felt the passion of the ideal? 
Do you hear the trumpet of the great campaign call- 
ing, and hear it with an eager heart? Choose ye, 
this day then, whom ye will serve, God or mammon. 
Remember now thy Creator, and the purpose for 
which thou wert created, in the days of thy youth. 
Set your hand to the plough of progress while its 
strength is yet undiminished, before the days come 
when desire shall fail. The day of diminished physi- 
cal strength comes to all, but the day of diminished 
spiritual power need never come. For those who 
take life in a great spirit, for those who live for great 
purposes, that day never does come: they go from 
strength to strength: they advance from nebulous 
enthusiasm to settled hope: and from their lips the 
melancholy cry is never wrung — We have not 
wrought any deliverance on the earth. 

And to this one other thing may be added, that the 
deliverance of man can only come by man. It would 
have been easy for the Creator so to have created man 
that at a glance and without effort he might have 
read the secret of the stars, and the solution of the 
baffling problems written in the great stone book of 
Nature. But that was not God's will: and we our- 
selves can see some reason for it. We see that the 
mind of man has been indefinitely developed by its 
pursuit of science, and that had the difficulties been 
less, the gain to intellectual growth would have been 
less also. And in the same way God does not solve 

154 



THE GREATNESS OF MEN 



for us by some miraculous interference the moral and 
social problems of the earth. We have to work out 
the earth's deliverance, and in doing so we work out 
our redemption. We have to do it: you and I: the 
least as well as the greatest of us. We can and do, 
each of us, help or hinder the cause of human prog- 
ress. We all know how coral reefs are built. 
We know that every tiny cell in the growing reef is a 
tiny life that exhausts itself in fulfilling the mystic 
architecture of the reef, and when at last the com- 
pleted reef rises from the blue abyss of water, and 
becomes an island on which the palm trees spring, and 
men find a habitation and a home, it is the aggregate 
effort of myriads upon myriads of minute creatures 
that triumphs there. So progress is the aggregation 
of multitudinous human effort. Every life lived 
rightly, every struggle of the individual after right- 
eousness and justice, every humble effort of the 
humblest man or woman to make the world a better 
world, is a contribution to the scheme of things which 
the Master Architect has designed as the crown of 
human existence; and so it comes to pass that the 
humblest man may know before he dies that he has 
helped to work out some Divine deliverance on the 
earth. 

And so two lives stand clear before us, and two 
endings to life, each of which is possible to each of us. 
There is the life of the man delivered from himself : 
from inordinate ambition, vain pleasure, self -ease, and 

155 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



sensual hope: the life that gives itself a ransom for 
many, and dedicates itself to the great crusades of 
moral progress, and this is the Christian life. Such 
a man knows well what the lines mean — 

He only lives the world's life 
.Who hath renounced his own. 

He knows also what the saying means — 

Renounce joy for thy fellow's sake 
That's a joy beyond joy. 

And the end of such a life is triumph. All that he 
desired is not accomplished: but enough is done to 
assure him that right is triumphing, and that truth 
prevails : and so his final word is heroic — it is the 
farewell of the happy warrior — " I have fought the 
good fight, I have finished my course with joy." 

The other life begins and ends within itself. It 
contributes nothing to the public good, perhaps it 
hinders it. It is indifferent to all the struggles of the 
race: it scorns the enthusiasm of great men: it rises 
up to eat, it lies down to sleep — it sees the troops of 
freedom march to battle, it hears far off the trumpets 
blow, but it sits enchanted in its web of sloth, in its 
grossness of ignoble ease, and hearing it hears not, 
and seeing it does not understand. If at last it does 
see itself aright, it wakes only to discover the chances 
of a manful life for ever lost, and to bewail itself in 
the melancholy cry, " I have wrought' no deliverance 

156 



THE GREATNESS OF MEN 



in the earth." Those two lives in all their issues 
stand before each of us, and it is for us to choose 
which life shall be ours. Up, up, thou eager heart of 
youth, and hear the voice that calls thee I Up thou 
idle one and work while it is called to-day, before the 
night cometh when thou canst not work ! The torn 
flag of freedom floats upon the gale: the chivalry of 
Christ sweeps on to the endless Armageddon: your 
land, your motherland is calling you to help her. A 
thousand schemes of progress are yet unfulfilled, a 
thousand hopes stand disinherited, a thousand thou- 
sand voices of the poor and the oppressed call for 
the coming of the champion and deliverer. Up, and 
follow the captain of salvation; deliver the oppressed, 
bind up the broken-hearted, bring liberty to the cap- 
tive ; and know this, that they that " be wise shall 
shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they 
that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever 
and ever." 



1S7 



THE EXPLOITS OF FAITH 



IX 



THE EXPLOITS OF FAITH 

" But the people that do know their God shall be strong, and 
do exploits." — Dan. xi. 32. 

1^/1" ANY things about the Book of Daniel are 
.IV A difficult and disputed, but one thing is toler- 
ably clear, and this gives us the clue to the book — 
it was undoubtedly written for the encouragement 
of Jewish patriotism. No nation was ever so in- 
tensely patriotic as the Jewish, because none had so 
powerful an historic sense. The greatest hymns of 
the nation were glowing recapitulations of national 
history — the promise to Abraham, the deliverance 
from Egypt, the long story of the wilderness and the 
promised land. The most solemn acts of public wor- 
ship were vitally connected with national history, 
and when the Jew of to-day, standing an alien in the 
strange world of London, begins a discourse upon the 
Feast of Tabernacles, as I once heard for myself, with 
the sentence — " Three thousand five hundred years 
ago to-day " — he strikes the chord of patriotism that 
survives all the change of empire and civilization, and 
the vicissitudes of time. But Jewish patriotism dif- 

161 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



fers from every other form of patriotism in the fact 
that it is dominated completely by the sense of God. 
It recognises not only its own part in history, but 
God working through all events His indisputable and 
sovereign will. It reads past, present, and future, 
not in the light of the human only, but of the 
Divine. And thus Daniel expresses all that is 
noblest in this patriotism, when he links God 
with, or rather enthrones God in the centre of all 
Jewish heroism, by saying " The people that know 
God shall be strong, and do exploits." 

In all human history it would be hard to find any 
figure so pathetic and sublime as the Jew. He has 
been the prey of all nations and their master, their 
spoil and their spoliator. He has been flung down 
into an unutterable depth of infamy, but the infamy 
has constantly recoiled upon his persecutors. His 
lot has been made bitter by every species of wrong, 
cruelty, and inhumanity, but he has survived them, 
and like the great disowned Prophet of his nation has 
been constantly crucified, only to rise again upon the 
third day. In the utmost darkness he has found a 
light to guide him, and amid the most terrible of 
deprivations a hope to console and support him. He 
stands amid new nations and civilizations to-day, him- 
self unchanged — the wonder and the enigma of the 
world. He has survived the Roman and the Greek, 
and in turn he may survive the Teuton and the 
Anglo-Saxon. If we can fancy any human creature 

162 



THE EXPLOITS OF FAITH 



standing on the ruins of Westminster bridge and sur- 
veying the desolation that was once called London, it 
will not be Lord Macaulay's mythical New Zealander 
— it will be a Jew. In the presence of this strange 
race all the people of modern Europe are but children 
just out of school; for the Jew had a literature and 
a philosophy, when our forefathers were barbarians 
and worshipped blocks of wood and stone. And as 
one surveys that literature and philosophy ; as one 
endeavours to arrive at the secret hidden in all this 
long, chequered, pathetic and sublime history, one 
fact continually emerges: the greatest periods of the 
nation coincide with the periods when the sense of 
religion was strongest among the people: the most 
terrible downfalls and dispersions with the loss of 
that religious sense. It is not merely a philosophic 
truth, therefore, which is stated in this passage, it is 
an historic fact, for the Jew has been strong and 
done exploits because he has known his God. 

The theme which this passage suggests then is the 
certainty of God as the secret of noble human achieve- 
ment. Let me, in the first place, make three pre- 
liminary observations. The first is that the total 
effect of modern science has been to make the existence 
of God an absolute necessity of human reason. Fifty 
years ago such a result was not anticipated, and at a 
much more recent date it was generally assumed that 
the final effect of science would be the destruction of 
religion. But as the great conjectures and discov- 

163 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 

eries of science have followed one another in their 
startling sequences, it has more and more been felt 
that the last step of science leaves us kneeling before 
the altar which is dedicated to the unknown God. 
Science has told us much about the functions of life, 
and the infinitely delicate and wonderful contrivances 
by which these functions are discharged, but it has 
failed utterly to tell us what life is and to explain its 
origin. It has explained the brain, but it has not 
told us how poetry, imagination, and thought come 
into existence. It has gone through the house of 
life, unlocking every door, but before one door which 
conceals what religious men call the chamber of the 
soul it has paused, confessing inadequacy and defeat. 
It has traversed every road of space, only to find 
itself finally face to face with the inscrutable and 
mysterious Power that inhabits eternity, and fills 
all things. Natural Law — yes, it has codified that 
with marvellous skill and patience, but it has also 
been forced to confess some Intelligence which is at 
once the controller and inventor of natural law. And 
this all true men of science have long ago admitted. 
Materialism has had its day, and its power is already 
gone. The intelligent man can no longer content 
himself within limits so narrow and confined. He 
would never have tried to do so, if he had more 
closely observed the spirit of his masters, for Darwin 
himself adopts as a motto for his famous " Origin of 
Species " the saying of Bishop Butler, that the only 

164 



THE EXPLOITS OF FAITH 



" distinct meaning of the word natural is stated, 
fixed, and settled: and that it as much requires an 
intelligent agent to effect anything statedly, fixedly, 
regularly — that is naturally — as to effect it for 
once only ■ — or supernaturally." And that, I need 
not tell you, is the confession of science that without 
God the universe is inexplicable. 

The second observation I make is that the morality 
of man is a guarantee of the moral nature of God. 
Granted a Creator, it is a thing incredible that the 
creature should be greater than the Creator, for the 
river cannot rise higher than its source. Suppose 
that at the beginning of the Ten Commandments there 
were no preface, declaring that " God spake all these 
words and said " : suppose that man had evolved 
entirely out of his own conscience the commandments 
not to kill, not to steal, not to covet, not to worship 
graven images and so forth; even then you would not 
be rid of God. For if man is the creature, and some- 
where there exists a Creator, it follows, does it not, 
that the creature cannot reach a height of moral 
thought impossible to the Creator? If man feels 
that lying, adultery, and murder are wrong, we may 
be sure of it that there is some final and supreme 
authority which also judges these things as wrong. 
Thus the strongest witness to a moral God lies in the 
moral nature of man. Man has a right to say as 
John Stuart Mill said, " I will call no Being good, 
who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to 

165 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



my fellow creatures, and if such a Being can sentence 
me to Hell for not so calling him, to Hell I will go." 
That is what man says as he stands before the silent 
altars of the invisible : he says there what he has said 
before the meaner tribunals of earth, " Here I take 
my stand, I can do no other." Whatever is moral in 
man exists in an infinite perfection in God: whatever 
is lovely, in a higher loveliness : whatever is pure in a 
loftier purity, and thus a man knows God by his 
knowledge of himself. 

The third observation is, that the ultimate meaning 
and the very essence of Christianity, is the revelation 
it gives us of man's capacity for God. It does this 
not so much by the statement of a philosophic truth 
as by a practical and living illustration — the Per- 
son of Jesus Christ. It shows us a man, and says 
that if God lived upon this earth, His life would be 
precisely what the life of this man was. It shows us 
this man under every variety of circumstance: poor, 
despised, rejected: praised, flattered, hated: coming 
into awful collision with evil, not only in the delib- 
erate conflict of the desert, but in the city, and in the 
daily conduct of life: following truth to His own 
destruction, loving His fellow men as no creature ever 
loved, consoled under every difficulty by the certainty 
of an invisible world of spirit more real and enduring 
than the actual world of the senses, going finally to 
His martyrdom with a sense of triumph — and it 
says, " Thus God would have done, had God been 

166 



THE EXPLOITS OF FAITH 



man " : and again, " This was God, so revealed that 
all men may know Him " : and yet again, " Even 
thus God may live in every man." The capacity for 
God — the power of the human soul to receive God 
into itself, the power of the humblest man to live 
as God would have lived, had God lived this life — 
that is the supreme revelation of Christianity, and 
those that thus know God shall be strong and do 
exploits. 

And now let us turn once more to this suggestive 
saying. If these things are true, then they are the 
greatest of all truths. It may occur to some of you 
to complain that this theme is purely academic, and 
to ask what relation has abstract truth to human ac- 
tion? That is the question which is answered in this 
text. We all dwell in two worlds — the world of 
thought, and the world of conduct. No man dwells 
exclusively in either the one or the other. The 
thinker is not only a thinker, the doer is not only a 
doer. Both are engaged in one supreme occupation, 
which is the conduct of life, and life cannot be con- 
ducted except upon some acknowledged principles. 
In other words, you must have wise and right 
thoughts, if you are to live a wise and right life. It 
is the merest folly to say " It does not much matter 
what I think if I act rightly," because action is 
thought in motion, and what a man thinks he will 
inevitably do and be. And this is the plain meaning 
of this saying; what it amounts to is that the s§- 

167 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



cret of all national life, all individual life, and all 
human heroism is found in religion — or in other 
words, is what nations and men think about God. 

The secret of all national life lies in national re- 
ligion — take that proposition first. Let me endeav- 
our to put it not as an abstract truth, but by way of 
concrete fact. Suppose a man should leave the shores 
of England and go upon a pilgrimage to explore the 
unknown regions of the East. The first land that he 
would see would be the shores of Spain, and the rock 
of Gibraltar, and there at once the problems of na- 
tional religion would salute him. He would look 
through the history of Spain, and he would discover 
that all the great episodes of its history were dom- 
inated by some religious idea. He would remember 
the reign of the Moors and their expulsion, the his- 
tory of the Spanish Jews and their downfall, the 
Armada and its fate, and he would need no one to 
tell him that the greatest periods of Spanish history 
precisely coincided with the periods when the wit- 
ness of God was strongest in the nation. He would 
touch upon the shores of Italy, and he would remem- 
ber how a Jewish fugitive named Paul had landed 
there nineteen centuries ago, had preached his Gos- 
pel, and how that Gospel had spread, till the whole 
face of the world was altered by it. He would touch 
at Egypt, and there he would see the memorials of 
a splendid and mysterious religion, a religion that 
had its symbols of the Trinity, of. incarnation and 

168 



THE EXPLOITS OF FAITH 

redemption, of resurrection and immortal life, thou- 
sands of years before Christ was born in Bethlehem. 
He would sail onward down the Red Sea, and all the 
history of Israel would unfold its panorama to the 
mental eye; he would come to India, and a thousand 
stately temples would witness to the sense of religion 
which has dominated the three hundred millions of 
that land of wonders through the long centuries. 
Thus the thought of God would pursue him to what- 
ever land he went, and he would be unable to escape 
it. At many points these various systems of religion 
would differ, but he would see that men acted as if 
each were true, and that each was the offspring of 
the sense of God in man. He would find that re- 
ligious ideas and hopes had entwined themselves with 
the laws, the customs, and the literature of these 
lands, and as he surveyed the customs of these diverse 
lands and peoples he would discover that the greatest 
movements in each national life had been religious 
movements. He would return to England and the 
same lesson would meet him in his own history. He 
would read of Lollards, Reformers, Covenanters, 
Puritans ; he would read a thousand stories of heroic 
struggle out of which the strong tree of modern 
civilisation and liberty drew its strength; he would 
see vast political issues constantly springing out of 
the triumph of religious ideas. And everywhere one 
lesson — the people who knew their God were strong 
and did exploits, and in proportion to the power of 

169 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



religion over the national mind, was the greatness 
of the nation, and the height to which it attained in 
the scale of nations. 

Again : The Secret of the intellectual life of men 
reveals the same lesson. For modern men some half 
a dozen names stand supreme as recording the great- 
est height to which intellect has attained. When we 
have mentioned Newton, Bacon, Shakespeare, Milton, 
Dante, Goethe, we have counted the brightest stars 
in the firmament of intellect. Turn to their teach- 
ings, and you will find at once that the keynote of 
each life was faith in God. Erase God from the 
writings of Shakespeare, Milton, or Dante, and they 
crumble into utter incoherence. Ask Bacon and 
Newton on what their whole philosophy is based, and 
they will answer without an instant's hesitation, " On 
God, the Primal cause, the Primal morality, the 
Primal goodness : the Light of lights, the Lord of 
lords, the King of kings ! 99 Turn to Goethe, the 
most pagan of moderns, and you will hear him telling 
you in his old age that he trusts that he shall never 
be so weak as to lose his conviction in personal im- 
mortality. And if you come to modern times, the 
lesson is the same. All that we call poetry springs 
from man's conscious sense of God. The human 
mind can soar in one direction only, and that is up- 
ward. Could either Tennyson or Browning have 
been the great poets and teachers they were, had they 
not been permeated by the sense of God? Could even 

1T0 



THE EXPLOITS OF FAITH 



a Matthew Arnold have written as he did if there 
had not been under all his intellectual negations a 
solid substructure of inherited religious conviction? 
No: the history of the human mind is one long and 
invariable testimony to this truth, that the men who 
know their God, these are they that are strong and 
accomplish the magnificent exploits of genius. 

Again : turn to the story of human heroism as it is 
written in the record both of men and nations, and it 
is not possible to mistake the enormous influence of 
religious belief on human conduct. Where is your 
hero who has not found the sanction of his heroism, 
and its vital impulse, in the sense of his relation to 
God? The fact is that atheism withers the heart, 
and is destructive of all those large and generous 
passions that make the hero. From the day when 
Stephen looked with dying eyes in the blue depths of 
the Syrian sky, and saw the heavens opened, and 
Jesus standing at the right hand of God — from 
that day and long before it — man has always en- 
couraged himself in the great sacrificial exploits of 
heroism by the conviction that they are a duty which 
he owes to God as well as to man: and owes to man 
simply because he recognises his responsibility to 
God. We may say what we like about atheism but 
we cannot reason away the fact that it belittles human 
nature, and destroys its capacity for heroism. It 
means something — it means far more than we sup- 
pose — that a Socrates finds the secret of courage 

171 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 

in the sense that he obeys a divine intuition which he 
calls his " daemon," that a Joan of Arc hears " The 
voices " calling her to the thorny way of martyrdom 
— that a Nelson dies thanking God for his great 
opportunity of doing his duty. Teach a man that 
there is a higher voice than man's which he is capable 
of obeying — that he is surrounded by an unseen 
cloud of spirit witnesses, that heaven applauds him, 
that heaven stretches forth a starry crown for him, 
and that his dying may be but the birth-throe of a 
larger life — teach him that, and he can be a Hero. 
Teach a nation that, and a nation can be heroic. 
Then you have the sublime constancy of Vaudois 
peasants under every species of torture, and you 
have the revolt of the Netherlands which breathes into 
a little harried nation such a spirit of indomitable 
courage that it can oppose, and finally defeat, the 
malice of the greatest military power in Europe. 
They were strong, these Vaudois martyrs, these 
Piedmontese peasants, these plain Dutch burghers — 
they were strong and did exploits because they knew 
their God. They committed their souls to God in 
flame, and feared not what man could do unto them. 
They were conscious of invisible hosts that marched 
with them, and of an invisible Captain whose word 
like a trumpet stirred their hearts. They could die, 
but could not lie, they could be tortured and not 
accept the traitor's infamous deliverance. And from 
first to last in the long and splendid record of human 

TO 



THE EXPLOITS OF FAITH 



heroism the story is the same; the heroic exploits of 
the world are the exploits of faith, and the greatness 
of man has always been nourished by the sense of a 
Power beyond and above the world, whose he was, and 
whom he served. 

Nor need we turn only to departed history for the 
illustration of such experiences as these. Show me 
the greatest exploits of modern life, the most memor- 
able episodes of human action, in which man is seen 
at his sublimest and his noblest. Where are these to 
be found in such gray days as ours, do you ask? 
The story of the Salvation Army is one, the life of 
Livingstone another, the daily history of missionaries 
in heathen lands and city slums, a third. Taken only 
as romance there is nothing in modem history more 
wonderful than the story of General Booth, no 
figure that moves upon a higher plane of heroism 
than Livingstone, as he passes into the abyss of the 
Dark Continent holding aloft his simple lamp of 
truth, no stories that display a loftier courage than 
the stories of modern missionaries - — those daring ad- 
venturers of the Soul, who in a hundred lands have 
held not their lives dear unto them for the testimony 
of Jesus. Jesus — they never saw Him, but they 
have known His presence : they have heard His word, 
they have found God in Him, and this was the vic- 
tory that overcame the world, even their faith. 
Jesus — He died nineteen hundred years ago in the 
flesh — yet is He alive for evermore, and they have 

173 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



known Him in the rapture of a fellowship that lifted 
them far above either the scorn or the fear of man. 
And so they did exploits, so they are doing them 
every day — men and women like ourselves who walk 
these dingy roads of life with crowns upon their 
heads, marching to the rhythm of a loftier music 
than the world supplies — they are strong and do 
exploits because they know their God. 

It may perhaps be said, that great lives are not 
within the reach of most of us, and that, therefore, 
it is vain thus to speak as though the exceptional 
in human conduct could ever be the rule of the nor- 
mal. But the value of great lives is that they set 
the measure of what all lives should aspire to be, and, 
therefore, we cannot speak too much of them. And, 
moreover, all greatness is relative, and the faith of 
Livingstone will make the life of any man noble, even 
though that life knows no sublime adventure, but 
is lived from first to last in complete obscurity, in 
humblest drudgery, and in conditions where it never 
can attract the eye of any single sympathetic or 
generous spectator. Or, again, it may be said, that 
such spiritual experiences as these — the experiences 
that make men great — do not happen to the common 
or the average man. Ah, but the common man also 
has his experiences — his high moments when God 
seems real and near to him, and will you remember 
that your 64 highest moments are your truest mo- 
ments." Or it may be said, again, that to know God 

174 



THE EXPLOITS OF FAITH 

is a thing so difficult to man, so rare, so exceptional, 
and demands such a special temperament, that the 
ordinary man cannot attain to such convictions, and 
can only say in sadness, " Such knowledge is too won- 
derful for me, I cannot attain unto it." But 
we can all of us learn something of the Person of 
Christ — and religion is not the attainment of a great 
philosophic truth, but a love for Christ which makes 
us His disciples. God is truly revealed to us in 
Christ, and when we try to live just as Christ lived, 
then we live as God Himself has lived upon the earth, 
and multitudes of quite humble people have found 
that possible in every age by love and faith, and by 
the Gift and Power of the Holy Spirit. And so you, 
young man going into the city every day, you who 
have no wide sphere of influence, and earn your bread 
in some unknown bye-walk of this great crowded life 
around us — you can claim this text, and its promise 
is for you. You can practice what Jeremy Taylor 
called the great essential of holy living — " The 
practice of the presence of God." You can live as 
seeing Him who is invisible, and your whole life will 
put on a new dignity, and know a new and gracious 
peace for that vision. You will be strong and work 
exploits, living a life worth living, and that shall be 
memorable, if you will but open your heart to the 
knowledge of God, and live as ever in your great 
Taskmaster's eye. And amidst much that is mean in 
life, much that is sordid, much that is commonplace, 

175 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



you will live a life that is far from mean, or sordid, 
or commonplace, for you will learn to say with Russell 
Lowell in his great hymn of faith — 

God of our fathers, Thou who wast, 

Art, and shall be — 
We who believe Life's bases rest, 
Beyond the probe of chemic test, 
Still, like our fathers, feel Thee near. 

I do not grudge you the pleasures of youth: I do 
not suppose that you can each attain to philosophic 
insight and sobriety of thought: I do not imagine 
that it is within the compass of each of you to be 
what the greatest of men have been: but you can 
know your God, you can live in the steady sense of 
God's presence, and he who does this, be his mind 
never so limited in its range, and his life never so 
narrow in its opportunities, shaJl be strong, and shall 
do exploits. 



176 



THE CHANGED FORM, THE ONE CHRIST 



X 



THE CHANGED FORM, THE ONE CHRIST 

" After that He appeared in another form unto two of them, 
as they walked, and went into the country." — Mark xvi. 12. 

THIS is the bare record of one of the appear- 
ances of Christ to the disciples, fully told for 
us in the story of the journey to Emmaus which 
occurs in the last chapter of St. Luke's Gospel. 
That story is familiar to all of us. Two disciples, 
appalled by all that has occurred in Jerusalem, set 
out in the eventide for Emmaus convinced that the 
whole propaganda of Christianity is at an end, pre- 
pared to renounce its hopes and to take up once more 
the dreary tasks of a commonplace and unillumined 
life. As they walk and are sad they are overtaken 
by a stranger who talks with them in friendliest in- 
tercourse, accepts their hospitality, and is finally 
known to them as Jesus in the breaking of bread. 
Among the various incidents of the Resurrection this 
stands alone, if one may say so. Christ nowhere 
appears so simply human as in this episode of Em- 
maus. He is the friend and comrade: He wears no 
aspect of awe or majesty: He speaks no words that 

179 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



thrill the heart with a terror of the supernatural — 
only warm loving human words, which cause the 
hearts of these forlorn men to burn with passionate 
affection. This is made strikingly manifest in one 
circumstance: the women who see Him at the sepul- 
chre are afraid, the disciples in the upper chamber, 
seeing a form of unearthly majesty outlined on the 
air, are terrified, and suppose that they have seen a 
spirit. But here there is simple gladness and no fear. 
Christ has appeared to them in another form — not 
as the supernatural, but the natural Jesus: not as 
the nrysterious conqueror of the grave, but as the 
Human Friend and Leader. 

The arresting thought of this passage lies in the 
phrase " another form." Does it not suggest that 
men see Christ with different eyes, and that Chris- 
tianity itself appears to men in differing forms? 
Does it not suggest that religion allows full play for 
the varied idiosyncrasy of men, and that we must 
not expect every man to discern religious truth pre- 
cisely as we ourselves discern it? And in this large 
allowance for the individual point of view, do we not 
find something thoroughly consonant with the known 
order of the world, and ought we not to learn a les- 
son in charity which we all need to learn? This is 
the theme which grows out of the text, and it is 
one eminently worth our careful and humble investi- 
gation. 

I say, in the first place, that there is something in 
180 



THE CHANGED FORM 



this suggestion which is in thorough consonance with 
the known order of the world. Thus, for example, 
it is the plainest of all known facts, that no two men 
ever see any feature of the physical universe about 
us with quite identic vision. Two men look upon a 
sunset or a wide and distant view, but each sees the 
splendid pageant differently, and the kind of emo- 
tion which each feels manifests a wide, and possibly 
an irreconcilable, variation. Two men look upon a 
flower: but if the one man be Wordsworth, he sees 
in it thoughts that lie too deep for tears: and if the 
other man be a Peter Bell, 

In vain thro' every changeful year 
Does nature lead him as before: 
A primrose by the river's brim 
A yellow primrose is to him, 
And it is nothing more. 

Two poets write of Nature : but where one sees law, 
the other sees love, and while for one the message of 
Nature is sombre and majestic immutability, for the 
other it is a kind of noble sympathy. Two artists 
go out to paint the same scene, but each sees some- 
thing in it not manifest to the other, and when each 
has completed his picture you will find as wide a 
difference in the two pictures as you find in the two 
men. These are illustrations so simple and common- 
place that they are familiar to the least observant, 
and they go to prove that we all see with different 
eyes. 

181 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



Again, love always sees with different eyes. For 
the true lover there is something in the beloved that 
none but he can see — a beauty real to him, but per- 
haps wholly hidden from any one else, a grace and 
charm which thrill his heart but do not appeal so 
fully to another. This is one of the facts of human 
life, at once beautiful, pathetic, and astonishing. 
Few men marry beauty, but all think they do: they 
see an ideal image which to them is real, and years 
pass, and gray hairs come, and the bloom of youth 
perishes, but, where love is true and constant, all 
this havoc is not so much as noticed, and the old man 
beholds in the helpmeet of his life, not the worn and 
wasted form the world sees, but the wife of his youth, 
the bride that linked her hand with his before the 
altar. And in the same way, what woman is there 
who does not see a loveliness in her child which no 
one else sees ? It is not always that a child is beauti- 
ful, but to the mother the plainest child is never less 
than beautiful: and often and often, my heart has 
been moved with the wonder and the sacredness of 
motherhood, when I have seen some woman follow- 
ing every movement of a quite unattractive child with 
wistful and adoring eyes, as though the child were 
the very image of a perfect beauty. How do we 
account for these things? Simply thus: these human 
creatures have appeared to those who love them in 
another form, and love has transfigured and trans- 
formed them. 

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THE CHANGED FORM 



Take another fact which brings us still nearer to 
our theme. The great object of all the greatest art 
of this world has been the person of Jesus Christ: 
but as you go through some great gallery filled with 
examples of Old Masters how astonishing is the diver- 
gence of interpretation which you find ! The Christ 
of Michael Angelo, the Christ of Fra Angelico — a 
whole world of thought separates the two. For one 
painter the dominant image of Christ is an image of 
agony and shame, to him the Cross is the overwhelm- 
ing and awful thing, and do what he will he cannot 
tear himself from the contemplation of that sublime 
majesty of woe, that speechless sorrow and expiring 
meekness. But to another painter the vital fact 
about Jesus is not His death but His perfect life 
with men: and so you have pictures of Christ asleep 
beneath the palm trees of Egypt, Christ in the tem- 
ple with the money changers, Christ in the trium- 
phant magnanimity of His dealings with sinful men 
and women. Michael Angelo sees Christ as the 
awful Judge of quick and dead: Fra Angelico as the 
dear human presence, moving among men in simple 
friendliness, and " feeding the faint divine in human 
hearts." Which was right? you say. It is not a 
question of right or wrong — each was right because 
each saw something that was true — each saw some- 
thing that the other did not see — and Christ ap- 
peared to each in a different form. 

It is but a step further to the perception of an- 
183 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



other truth, that in the whole history of Christ and 
His Church there has always been this divergence 
of view and interpretation, and this wide allowance 
for human idiosyncrasy. Take, for example, 
Christ's revelation of Himself in His earthly life. 
He speaks as an ascetic when He says that the life 
is more than meat: He acts with the most genial 
acceptance of the uses of life when He is the friend 
of publicans and sinners, and eats with them. He 
speaks as one for whom all the outward aspects of 
the world are meaningless when He talks of the King- 
dom of God as within men: and again He speaks as 
one vividly awake to the significance of human 
events when He talks of the signs of the times, and 
declares the things that make for the peace of na- 
tions. He speaks as a non-combatant when He dis- 
claims the use of the sword, and in yet another 
passage He proclaims that He comes to bring not 
peace, but a sword among men. He is at one mo- 
ment the Good Shepherd, and the Lover of Souls: 
and at another the Judge, before whose face the 
wicked shall be bumed up as tares of the field. He 
makes no effort to reconcile these varying aspects of 
Himself and His message. He does not create, and 
does not seek to create, a uniform impression on the 
minds of men. His words can be the severest of all 
words, and they can be the sweetest : to the hypocrite 
He is a sword, to the humble a sanctuary. And what 
does it all mean but this — that Christ recognised 

184 



THE CHANGED FORM 

the infinite variations of human temperament, and 
He appeared in a different form to individual men, 
according to their power of apprehension, and their 
need of truth? And if this be true, it is equally true 
and indisputable, that the apostles, who were en- 
trusted with the great task of interpreting Christ to 
the world, each saw Christ in a different form. It 
was natural that Paul, trained from childhood in 
Rabbinical lore, and a Pharisee of the Pharisees, 
should see Christ chiefly in His relation to ancient 
Jewish types and ceremonies, and should interpret 
all things in the light of His supreme and atoning 
sacrifice. But it was equally natural to John that 
he should shed upon the story of Christ the light of 
a sublime mysticism, and that James should see it in 
the light of practical duties. Nor did the apostles 
themselves profess any perfect coincidence of view. 
Peter boldly speaks of certain things in Paul's teach- 
ing which are hard to be understood, which the un- 
learned and ungodly wrest or dislocate out of right 
relation, to their own destruction. It is not too 
much to say that divergence of interpretation began 
with the first moment of the organised church, and 
through all ages these divergencies have gone on. 
Think of the endless growth of sects and churches — 
of Christianity as it was variously discerned by the 
Crusader, the Monk, and the Puritan: of the Chris- 
tian of the Catacombs with his one simple and ex- 
quisite conception of the Shepherd with the lamb on 

185 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



His shoulder, and the Christian of the mediaeval ages, 
with his awful vision of Jesus as the King of Glory 
to whom approach was only possible through the 
softer virtues and gentle supplications of the Virgin 
Mother: think of religion as it is conceived in turn 
by Luther, Bunyan, and Wesley — by the High 
Churchman, the Quaker, and the Methodist: reflect 
not merely on the divergence of view involved in 
these conceptions of truth, but on the intense hostili- 
ties which they have provoked, the bitter feuds, the 
actual battles and cruel martyrdoms — and what 
have you to say to it all? There is but one thing 
that ought to be said — it is that Christ appeared 
to all these men in a different form. Each saw what 
he was capable of seeing, and each saw something 
that was vitally and therefore eternally true. 

You will notice further that all the troubles of the 
Church have arisen from the attempt to enforce unity 
and identity of view. How significant is this simple 
statement of the Evangelist ; " He appeared in an- 
other form unto two of them : and they went cuiid told 
it unto the residue: neither believed they them." No : 
they were willing enough to believe that their own 
revelation of Jesus was authentic — that the Jesus 
seen in the upper room, and the garden was real — 
but this pilgrim Jesus, talking with these two men 
on the road to Emmaus — this forsooth could only 
be hallucination. What they had seen and felt was 
true: what others had seen and felt, was not credible: 

186 



THE CHANGED FORM 



so early do we find an illustration of the saying that 
orthodoxy is my doxy, and heterodoxy is everybody 
else's doxy. And this spirit, a spirit really of in- 
tolerant egoism and vanity, has been at work among 
men ever since ; and it has caused more mischief, more 
disruption, more strife and clamour than any other 
score of causes you could name. It is a thing per- 
fectly right and even noble in a man that he should 
say — " This is true, I pledge my life upon it ! 99 but 
no man has the right to say " This only is true," 
because he ought to remember that something else 
may be true which it is not given him to discern. 
But the tendency of human nature is always to ex- 
alt a partial truth into the whole truth, and to label 
as falsehood any form of truth that does not com- 
mend or reveal itself to us. You can scarcely have 
a more pertinent illustration of this intolerance than 
in the case of Luther, who is eager to tear the whole 
Epistle of St. James out of the New Testament, be- 
cause he is incapable of seeing how it shapes with the 
vital truth that man is saved not by works, but by 
grace and faith: and yet Luther himself was a great 
heretic, who had insisted upon his right of private 
interpretation of truth against the whole force of 
the Roman Church, and had asserted that Christ had 
appeared to him in another form, and that his own 
vision of Christ was to be respected and allowed. 
But the case is by no means unusual. You will con- 
stantly find that the man who claims liberty of judg- 

187 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 

ment for himself is not prepared to extend that 
liberty to others. You will find that the man who in 
his youth is a heretic, contrives to elevate his heresy 
into orthodoxy by the time the period of middle life 
is reached, and that he who fought hard for tolerance 
in his manhood has become as intolerant a,s the worst 
inquisitor of Rome by the time old age is reached. 
If Luther was capable of recognising truth, surely 
St. James was not less capable, and had an even 
better opportunity : but no : this is the whole truth, 
says Luther, and he will not allow that Jesus had 
appeared to St. James in another form. In no other 
domain than theology do men dare to claim this ar- 
rogant right of infallibility. In politics, in science, 
in medicine, all thoughtful men are willing to admit 
that there is something to be said for the views of 
their antagonists. They recognise the falsehood of 
extremes, and the uncertainties of knowledge teach 
them diffidence and humility. But in theology, 
which is the most subtle and difficult of all sciences, 
depending less on intellectual deductions than in- 
dividual intuition and experience — here, and here 
alone, men dare to speak with the accent of arrogant 
infallibility. And they do more: they are determined 
to force their views upon everybody. They will 
allow nothing for human idiosyncrasy. They libel, 
deride, defame, and excommunicate all who will not 
agree with them. They carry their creed upon the 
sword point, and are prepared to plunge whole na- 

188 



THE CHANGED FORM 



tions into bloody war for the interpretation of a 
text, or even a phrase. In a word all that is most 
disgraceful in ecclesiastical history, all that has di- 
vided the Church and has dyed the garments of truth 
with the martyr's blood, may be traced to this one 
cause: men will not believe that Christ appears to 
their brothers in another form, and will not accept 
as truth, any statement of truth that differs from 
their own. Neither believed they them: it is the sad- 
dest sentence in the whole history of Christianity. 

But from these general statements let us pass 
finally to those particular lessons which we all need 
to learn. 

The first is that the revelation of Christ to the 
individual soul will always vary with the individual. 
The greatest miracle in all the world is the miracle of 
human individuality: that in a hundred million of 
men and women you will not find two exactly alike : 
two, who see things from precisely the same angle of 
vision ; two, who know entire identity of thought and 
feeling. It is so that God has chosen to make His 
children; each man a world in himself, each with 
subtle variations of character and temperament, that 
distinguish him from all other human creatures. 
And thus it happens, that just as no two men see the 
world of nature as quite the same, so religion takes 
its own form for each. There is no one of us for 
whom all the doctrines of Christianity are equally 
important. There are moral and intellectual condi- 

189 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



tions which give sharpness and cogency to certain 
truths, and which invest some truths with a reality 
which we do not feel in relation to others. The fear 
of God is for one man the dominant note of all re- 
ligion — the love of God for another: and there are 
changes of experience in ourselves which make one 
truth the whole truth to us in youth, and quite an- 
other truth the master-star that rules our maturer 
years. Christ appears to us in many forms — and 
if we compare our thoughts about Christ to-day with 
those fainter and more obscure perceptions that we 
had twenty years ago, we can mark a very wide 
change of view. And if we ourselves know variations 
of view, it is no cause for astonishment that other 
men see Christianity in quite a different light from 
ourselves. The one divine light has come to us and 
them, but it streams through a differing medium — 
yet it is the same light of life. The same Christ has 
appeared to the scholar in the upper room of learn- 
ing, and to the humble disciple on the road of 
sorrow, but the revelation has been tempered to the 
need of each. Those also are disciples who do not 
see what we see: those also are Christians who are 
not of this fold. There are many voices of truth, 
but none without significance: there are many rev- 
elations of Christ to men, but He appears in a differ- 
ing form. 

The second lesson is that we should learn not to 
despise a revelation of truth which we ourselves do 

190 



THE CHANGED FORM 



not need or comprehend. Think, for example, of the 
great multitude of souls who are numbered in the 
Roman Catholic communion. To us it may be that 
many of the predominant dogmas of the Roman 
Catholic faith are quite unintelligible or even pro- 
fane. They mean nothing to us, and we cannot 
fancy ourselves, under any transformation or com- 
pulsion of circumstance accepting them. But it is 
certain that they mean much to these multitudes of 
souls. It is equally certain that there must be some 
element of vital truth behind them all, or they had 
never fastened themselves so firmly on the human 
mind and conscience through so many ages. We are 
prepared to admit that to the truly pious Catholic, 
Christ has appeared in another form ; but the charity 
we practise we also claim. We demand that we shall 
not be called heretics by those whom we are prepared 
to call Christians. And in regard to the High 
Churchman we say the same thing. His view of 
truth is not ours: but we gladly admit that there is 
truth in his view and that Christ has appeared to him 
in another form. We give up nothing of our own 
convictions in such an admission: we ask him to give 
up none of his: but we do claim that we also have 
received our revelation of Christ, and that we also are 
His Church. 

Think again of the nobler forms of pagan piety 
still extant in the world, and remember the exceeding 
breadth of the inspired statement that Christ is the 

191 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



light of every man who cometh into the world. The 
narrow-minded Christian is puzzled when he finds so 
much in the life of Buddha which closely resembles 
the life of Jesus. He is still more puzzled when he 
hears of natural religion among the heathen, of 
virtue, temperance, chastity, self-sacrifice, of rev- 
erence for sacred things, of sincere and ardent effort 
to live in the light of the highest known duty. But 
St. Paul found no difficulty in the presence of such 
facts. He admitted the existence of natural religion. 
And both in the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles 
we have notable examples of noble-minded pagans 
who fasted, prayed, and gave alms, who cultivated 
the spiritual life by such means as lay in their power, 
and achieved a very high standard of character. 
What can we say to these things but this — that 
Christ appeared to them in another form? For 
where the Spirit of Jesus is, there is the revelation 
of J esus — and the light that lighteth every man who 
cometh into this world is capable of streaming even 
through a pagan creed, of shining in the face of 
Buddha, of manifesting itself to sincere and honest 
souls everywhere: and without such a truth to sus- 
tain us it would be impossible to look upon the world 
at all, save with utter horror and despair. 

And think of the many forms of religion in our 
own midst. So far as ecclesiastical forms go they 
are irreconcilable. Nay, more than that, we should 
lose by their complete fusion, for . organic unity is 

192 



THE CHANGED FORM 



not desirable, even were it possible. It is not desira- 
ble simply because men have, and must needs have, 
inherent differences from one another. Because we 
do see truth from different angles of vision, we must 
needs have a great variety of Christian organisations 
to express these different visions of truth. When 
Christ prayed that His flock might be one, it was 
not organic but spiritual unity that He desired. 
And that spiritual unity is attained when men do see 
the authentic vision of Christ — the Church is one 
simply by virtue of loyalty and love to Christ — and 
it matters nothing at all, except by way of consola- 
tion and encouragement, that each Christian organ- 
isation sees the Saviour in a different form. 

But this let us all know, that we must see Christ 
or die in our sins. Until we see Him we are lost — 
lost as those men were lost, who had nothing left to 
live for, no hope in earth or heaven, no care for any- 
thing but to hasten back to the old sensual earthly 
life, which they had left at the call of Christ. To 
be carnally minded is death : to be spiritually minded 
is life and peace — and they were turning their backs 
on life, they were going back to the ways of death. 
And to them the Risen Life spoke: the Christ once 
more became manifest. What matter how He came, 
and in what form — the thing was, He did come, and 
they saw. and believed. And for us let there be no 
further talk of forms — let us rather fix our whole 
mind on this one truth, we must believe or die. How 

193 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



Christ shall show Himself to you I care not: in what 
form of Christian organisation you are likeliest to 
find the authentic vision of Christ, I will not even 
discuss — go where you will, worship as you like, 
join any church that seems most to meet your needs 
— but be content with nothing less than this, the 
actual revelation of Christ as Saviour, Atonement, 
Redeemer, to your own soul — for we must see Christ 
or perish, we must believe or die. 



194 



UTTER KNOWLEDGE IS UTTER LOVE 



UTTER KNOWLEDGE IS UTTER LOVE 



" For He knew what was in man?' — John ii. 25. 
" Jesus knew from the beginning who they were that be- 
lieved not, and who should betray Him." — John vi. 64. 



IHUS the Evangelist speaks of his Master, and 



A it is a statement often repeated. Alone, of all 
those who have taught and led humanity, Christ had 
a comprehensive and adequate knowledge of men. 
He made no mistakes; before His luminous search- 
ing gaze the secrets of all hearts were revealed. He 
was betrayed, knowing that He was betrayed ; cruci- 
fied, foreseeing His crucifixion. Nothing in the final 
tragedy surprised Him; He had long before re- 
hearsed every predetermined detail of His agony. 
And nothing in the last days of Christ is so singu- 
lar and striking as this calm profound discernment. 
But it is really of a piece with all His life, for in all 
His dealings with the world, in the midst of a thou- 
sand plots and conspiracies, traps, ambushes, hypocri- 
sies, flatteries disguising hatred, and adulation 
covering scorn, He was never deceived as to the 
motives and springs of human conduct — " He knew 
what was in man." 




19*7 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 

Now the point which interests us most in such a 
statement is this: how did Christ act under this ter- 
rible burden of knowledge? For our first instinctive 
thought is that such knowledge can only be regarded 
as a crushing burden. Whoi would care to know 
the intimate secrets of the lives that most closely 
touch his own, and would be willing that his own 
heart should be exposed in all its nakedness even 
to the most sympathetic eye? We all of us walk 
through the world more or less tricked out in dis- 
guises, and we are content that it should be so. It 
is not cynicism, but a profound distrust and almost 
fear of human nature which makes us anxious not 
to pry too deeply into the lives of others, for who 
knows what we might find there? Would our friend 
be still our friend if his whole heart were laid bare 
to us? Would love survive the absolute revelation 
of all that has made up the texture of a life? All 
the meannesses, sins, follies, lusts, vanities, errors, 
which from time to time have stained the heart? Has 
it not often happened that some man or woman has 
been driven by a sudden impulse into the confession 
of some secret vice or weakness to a friend, only to 
discover too late that the confession rang the death- 
knell of friendship? And it was not that the friend 
behaved badly either; he meant to behave well, he 
tried to do so; but inevitably there was an altered 
estimate, and life was never the same again. These 
are the facts of experience that make us think that 

198 



UTTER KNOWLEDGE IS UTTER LOVE 



adequate, complete, absolute knowledge of another 
would be a terrible thing, that for our own peace half- 
knowledge is better, that only in very rare instances 
where the soul is perfectly lucid and the temper di- 
vinely generous and unselfish, can it be good for us 
to know all that may be known about another. Ob- 
serve then; Christ did know all about men; knew 
them to their last fibre ; knew them to the last coil of 
being; knew them to the innermost secrecies of ex- 
perience; yet He reverenced human nature, and all 
His relations with men and women were characterised 
of three great notes: Charity, Sympathy, and Hope. 

Adequate knowledge of men taught Christ Char- 
ity toward them ; think of that a moment. Take, 
for example, the relations of Christ with His dis- 
ciples. He knew what was in such men as Peter and 
Judas. Peter did not know himself, but his Lord 
knew him thoroughly. Very early in their intimacy 
Christ had gauged aright the vanity, pride, and moral 
weakness of Peter; yet never did Jesus love Peter 
more than in that moment when He looked upon him 
with that look which broke the recreant disciple's 
heart. He knew what was in Judas; yet not once 
in the three years' ministry is there a harsh word 
against Judas ; and when the final word is spoken 
which dismisses Judas from the discipleship it is not 
harsh, but ineffably tender, solemn, dignified, the re- 
luctant verdict of outraged love that still loves. And 
so with all the disciples ; there was enough of error 

199 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



and stupidity, of dull intractable lowness of thought 
and ideal, to hurt and offend Jesus grievously, yet 
He loved these men with a love stronger than death. 
How do we explain this constancy of love? The ex- 
planation is simple. Christ saw their virtues as well 
as their vices, their qualities as well as their defects ; 
He saw not an aspect of a man, but the whole man 
as he was, and the large and candid vision produced 
the large and noble charity of His regard. 

Here then is adequate knowledge inspiring not con- 
tempt but charity, and is not the lesson obvious? 
The longer I live the more clearly do I see that the 
harsh, contemptuous, uncharitable verdicts which we 
so often pass upon our fellow-creatures are almost 
always caused by inadequate knowledge. There 
is probably not a single person of our acquaint- 
ance who is not a good deal better than we suppose 
him, as we should readily discover if we knew him 
better. But alas, for us and him; we cannot 
restrain our tongues when we speak of him; we 
love to mock his peculiarities and his defects; 
we tell this and that caustic story at his expense ; we 
know some spiteful little anecdote about his habits 
or his temper; so we ridicule, or avoid, or defame, or 
misapprehend, or neglect a man who may have many 
concealed qualities of character far finer and rarer 
than any we ourselves can boast. Some people seem 
to have a positive genius for discovering the worst 
side of worthy men; they scent a fault a mile off, 

200 



UTTER KNOWLEDGE IS UTTER LOVE 

and do not perceive a virtue when it is beneath their 
nose. There are faults enough, no doubt, in human 
nature, but is it a worthy thing or a kind thing to 
make it your chief business to discover and catalogue 
them? Nay, is it a just thing? Have we not all 
known moments of compunction when we have found 
that we have wholly misjudged some fellow-creature 
through a purposed ignorance? Suddenly we have 
come upon the tragic facts of his domestic life, some 
secret calamity nobly concealed through years, some 
burden heroically borne, some grief endured in self- 
respecting reticence, and then we have been ashamed 
of our careless jesting. The man we thought mean 
has had others depending on him of whom we have 
never heard; the man we thought rough in temper, 
has gone through seas of sorrow which would have 
overwhelmed a man less masterful. O, believe me, 
of all the forces most fatal to human brotherhood, 
there is none that works such evil as the gibing 
tongue, the spiteful narrow temper that fixes itself 
like a leech on the faults of others, the mean cynical 
habit of judging everyone, not by the best in them, 
but by the worst; and clearly of all tempers none 
can be more utterly un- Christlike. For Christ 
who knew all that was in man, never failed in charity 
to man ; He who saw man most completely, loved man 
most perfectly. And so I repeat that the way to a 
larger charity towards others is better knowledge 
of them. You would not like others to judge you by 

201 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



your faults alone; judge not lest ye be judged. 
You would claim that if you have certain faults, 
at least you also possess some virtues; what you be- 
lieve of yourself learn to believe of others too. I 
have had to do in public life with many men whom 
I have loved, with some who did not attract me, with 
a few whom I have disliked; but I profess that I 
never yet met the man who had not some quality in 
him which deserved esteem, and often enough I have 
learned to love the man whom I began by disliking, 
because I have come to know him better with the lapse 
of time. The one sovereign remedy for an unchari- 
table temper is wider knowledge of humanity; for 
He who loved and honoured mankind most was He 
who knew the most about men, the Saviour who know- 
ing the worst, was never blind to the best, and ever 
judged men by their best rather than their worst. 

Jesus knew not only imperfect people but evil peo- 
ple; He knew what was in them, and what He knew 
taught Him Sympathy for them. Think for a mo- 
ment of Christ's treatment of that detested and for- 
lorn class of the Jewish community known as harlots 
and publicans. There was no question about the 
facts of their lives, they were notorious and infamous. 
The life of the one was then what it is now, a gilded 
shame, a smiling misery, a tragic fact, but all the 
same a fact not named, tacitly connived at, even ex- 
cused, but never pitied. The life of the publican was 
equally notorious ; he was hated as the agent of a ty- 

202 



UTTER KNOWLEDGE IS UTTER LOVE 



ranny, and he was treated universally as an outcast. 
If a Pharisee had been asked to express his opinion of 
these people, we can imagine what he would have 
said. He would have considered them not worth a 
thought ; they were wholly bad, the mere offal of hu- 
manity. Civilisation has its sewers, and sewers have 
their rats ; they were the sewer-creatures of humanity, 
possibly answering some purpose in the universal 
scheme, but no more worth consideration than the 
sewer-rat. That was the Pharisee's view, that is still 
the way in which people of respectable virtues think 
of these miserables of humanity. Everyone knows 
that such creatures exist, but it is convenient to 
forget their existence. As for treating them as hu- 
man, as having qualities not wholly despicable, as 
being amenable to any generous or pious impulses, 
that is absurd! Here is the bright street where the 
children of virtue walk clothed in shining raiment; 
below is the sewer and the rats, and it is nothing 
less than an insult to name the two in the same 
breath. 

How did Jesus think about the matter? Why, 
with a daring originality which we have wholly failed 
to comprehend, even though we have read His words 
a thousand times. Notice one thing only which He 
says ; He says that these were the very people who 
received- Him most gladly, and showed themselves 
most sympathetic to His spirit and His message. 
If you will make careful note of the sort of sins 

203 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



which Christ most vehemently denounced, you will 
discover that He had much less to say about the sin 
of the publican and the outcast, than the sin of 
the Pharisee. And what was the chief sin of the 
Pharisee? It was contempt of humanity, a con- 
tempt which led him into every detestable variety 
of rancour, spite, and malice. To hate your brother 
or sister, to see no good in them, to treat them as 
incapable of good, to spurn them, to loathe them, 
to trample them under the feet of your own swollen 
spiritual pride, that was the sin of all sins to Jesus. 
He knew what was in man, and because He knew, 
He discerned in these despised people, qualities which 
were not despicable; veins of pure gold running 
through the clay; fountains of pity under the crust 
of debasement; generous and noble tempers, strug- 
gling through the opposition of much that was ig- 
noble in life and habit, and He sympathised with 
them because He could comprehend them. 

Jesus knew Human Nature as a whole, and the 
result of His knowledge was Faith in man. 

" Faith in man 99 ; it is a phrase very easy to utter, 
but it represents a temper very difficult to achieve and 
maintain. Think of the ignorance, stupidity, and 
ingratitude of man; his indifference to the labours 
of the wise and the sacrifices of the heroic; his ina- 
bility or reluctance to follow truth with ardour or 
persistence; his carnal propensities, his perpetual 
sacrifice of the spiritual to the material, and his 

£04 



UTTER KNOWLEDGE IS UTTER LOVE 

consequent contempt and even hatred of those who 
disturb his base apathy with the vision of spiritual 
progress or attainment; think not only of the follies 
of the ignorant, and the crimes of the stupid, but 
of the weaknesses and follies of the good themselves; 
and who does not feel a certain hopelessness fall upon 
him like a cloud, when he endeavours to look into 
the long vista of the future of humanity? How 
rarely is it that the historian, who has traced the 
vacillations of the human will, through the blunders 
and disasters of centuries, comes to his last page 
with unabated hope? How rarely is it that statesmen 
are hopeful men; how much oftener do they fall 
into acrid cynicism, and flout and jeer the nation 
they would lead, rather than hearten and encourage 
it? How often do even leaders in religious and 
moral progress lose heart, tacitly admitting that the 
evil of the world is too great for them, and that the 
folly of man is incurable. Everyone knows the 
French proverb, so often quoted by John Morley, 
that he who would work for his fellow-men should 
see as little as possible of them, and that proverb 
is the very essence of disappointed altruism. What 
it expresses really is, that while it is a duty to work 
for others, yet man is a poor creature, and hardly 
worth the trouble you take over him. You may do 
some little good by your toil, but never what you 
hoped, designed, or expected, for human stupidity 
will prove invincible in the long run. Faith in man 

205 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



— no, it is a rare temper even in religious leaders ; 
possible to the young perhaps, but increasingly diffi- 
cult to the old, and in any case a temper not easy 
to maintain through a lifetime even by the most 
ardent of men. 

Turn once more to the story of Jesus, and you 
find that He did maintain this temper of faith in 
man. He was despised and rejected of men, yet 
He had faith in man. He knew more than any other 
has ever known of the baseness of the human heart, 
yet He had faith in the perfectibility of man. His 
story is a story of infinite injustice, betrayal, and 
treachery ; the noblest of the sons of men, yet is He 
treated as the basest; the wisest, He becomes the 
scorn of the foolish; the most magnanimous, yet is 
He the sport of the meanest; surely if anything 
could shake one's faith in humanity it would be such 
a tragedy as this ! But Jesus died full of hope 
for men; and it is exquisitely characteristic of Him 
that His last act was to gladden the soul of the dying 
robber who hung beside Him on the Cross. How 
did Jesus maintain this temper? It was the result 
of His perfect knowledge of humanity. He knew 
what was in man, and He knew that there was enough 
of good and of the desire of good even in the basest 
to encourage hopefulness. And if you and I have 
grown contemptuous of men, is it not because we 
have ceased to know them, ceased to put ourselves 
in close contact with them? Ah, what so easy as to 

206 



UTTER KNOWLEDGE IS UTTER LOVE 

live one's life apart, to pay no attention to the 
wonderful spectacle of human nature as a whole, 
and so slowly to absorb that miasma of cynicism, 
which is the inevitable punishment of a selfish mode 
of thought, and an isolated mode of life? You will 
always find that those who have most faith in man 
are those who come into closest contact with man 
at his worst. I have never yet met a City Missionary 
or a Salvation Army Captain, or even a prison-visitor, 
whose eyes did not light up with faith in man, as he 
related some story of pity among the. degraded, or 
kindness between the destitute. If you have lost 
faith in human nature, and want to recover it, the 
best suggestion that I can make is : Go down to some 
mission among the poor or the depraved, armed with 
kindness, and there amidst the dust and ashes of a 
half -ruined humanity, you will discover so much of 
goodness and greatness still left, that you will have 
no doubt about the inherent greatness of human na- 
ture. You know something of the outside of these 
men — their rags,, their dirt, their physical debase- 
ment ; learn to know what is m them, and you will 
find in the lowest, something to reverence and respect. 
And at least be sure of this; faith in God is quite 
impossible without faith in man. It was not for 
nothing that Christ put duty to our neighbour, the 
cup of cold water given to a child, the food to the 
hungry, the clothes to the naked, in the forefront of 
all piety; we cannot be in a right relation to God 

207 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



unless we are in right relation to our brother man, 
for if we love not our brother whom we have seen, 
how can we love God whom we have not seen ? 

" Thou knowest all things, thou knowest that I 
love thee," said Simon Peter, and so the last sug- 
gestion may be the Consolations of this theme. Do 
you recall what were the bitterest moments of child- 
hood? They were moments when the heart rankled 
with the sense of injustice, and what caused that 
sense of injustice? The conviction that we were not 
comprehended, that there was a side of our conduct 
that we could not explain, that our real motives 
were very different from our apparent motives. Peter 
knew all that this meant, but the perfect knowledge 
that Christ had of him was his consolation. " Tg 
know all is to forgive all," is one of those ancient 
proverbs which man has had to learn through his 
own agony. It is imperfect knowledge we fear 
most, for that means imperfect understanding. But 
where knowledge is perfect we have much less to 
fear, for He who knows the worst of us, knows 
equally the best. " Thou knowest all things, thou 
knowest that I love thee." 

Most men, in reviewing their lives, have a feeling 
that if everything were fully known, if the nature 
of their temptations were understood, and the whole 
struggle of their existence, if they were judged with 
a comprehending sympathy, which gave credit for 
the best in them, as well as blame for. the worst, things 

208 



UTTER KNOWLEDGE IS UTTER LOVE 

might not go so ill with them after all. The errors in 
a human court of justice are always the errors of im- 
perfect knowledge. Some poor creature is pilloried 
for judgment, and it is all a question of evidence, 
rarely of motive, never of temptation. Nor in the 
human court of justice is there any room for moral 
discernment. Morally, the blow struck in anger, 
which causes death, is much less reprehensible than the 
cool and calculated roguery which wrecks a hundred 
homes, and escapes with a few months' imprisonment. 
But human judgment takes no count of what is in the 
man ; if it did there is many a man arraigned for mur- 
der who would be lightly punished, and many a man 
arraigned for a lifetime of cruel devastating fraud 
who would be hanged. Such is human justice, but 
God's justice is wholly different. He who tries us 
at the last assize will know what is in us, will know 
us intimately, absolutely, and so we do not fear. 
So at least David argued in that wonderful 139th 
Psalm; the God who knows his downsitting and his 
uprising, and all his thoughts, will show him more 
mercy than one who only judged him from the out- 
side, and partially. Once more we see that perfect 
knowledge makes not for despair but faith. " If I 
am to be judged rightly, let me be judged by one 
who knows all about me," is what we all say; he 
who knows all will treat us more justly, more kindly 
than he who knows only a little, and that not the 
best about us. To such a judgment we can resign 

209 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



ourselves with confidence ; we can meet our Lord with- 
out fear, knowing that if we are punished, it will be 
punishment in which we ourselves shall acquiesce, be- 
ing confidently assured that the Judge of all the earth 
will do right. 

To say this perhaps sounds arrogance, but it is 
not; it is rather the sweet calm faith of the little 
child who is not afraid to meet his father. " My 
father will understand me," says the child; "he 
knows me in all my motives, he comprehends my 
temperament, he will make no errors." " Utter 
knowledge is but utter love," says Tennyson, and 
it is a profound truth. . If Christ who knew the worst 
of men found in the worst something that was worthy, 
something that was loveable, may we not humbly 
trust that in the great day of judgment He who 
knows us utterly will also love us utterly? May 
we not turn aside from the evil dreams of harsh 
theology, from the mis judgments and misapprehen- 
sions of men, to the faithful Creator and Father of 
our spirits, saying with confidence, 66 Into Thy hands, 
I commit my spirit " ? And when we are called to 
stand, as we so often are, by the death-bed of those 
who have manifested no very vigorous spiritual in- 
stincts, who go out into the unknown with no definite 
profession of faith, but taking with them a record 
of human faithfulness, and love, and generosity, 
marred, no doubt, by many errors, may we not then 
find consolation in the thought that He who knows 

210 



UTTER KNOWLEDGE IS UTTER LOVE 



what is in man will deal with these imperfect children 
far more wisely and tenderly than we can do ? " Utter 
knowledge is but utter love," and 

" The love of God is broader 

Than the measures of man's mind, 
And the heart of the Eternal 
Is most wonderfully kind." 

Because God knows what is in man He loves man 
with an everlasting love. Because God is Light, God 
is Love, and there we rest, persuaded that what we 
have committed to Him, He will keep against the 
eternal day, and that neither death nor life can part 
us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our 
Lord. 



211 



THE PERSONAL FACTOR IN RELIGION 



XII 



THE PERSONAL FACTOR IN RELIGION 

"For My sake and the Gospel's." — Mark viii. 35. 

WHEN you speak of Christianity you are not 
speaking of a philosophic creed, or an or- 
ganised system of thought, but of a form of passion, 
uniting Christ with individuals. Judaism is a com- 
posite creed, the work of many hands ; Christianity is 
Christ. The apostolic life of Paul had its source 
in one thing, and one alone, personal loyalty to a 
Master. The same thing may be said of all the 
great saints and heroes of Christianity through the 
ages ; of men as far apart in type as Xavier and 
Wesley, as Francis of Assisi and Chalmers of New 
Guinea — they speak a common language when they 
speak of Christ. They are not disciples in the sense 
in which a student is the disciple of a master; their 
whole life is lived in and through Christ, they are 
knit closer to Him than to any earthly friend or 
lover; their lives are lived, their sufferings are en- 
dured, their victories achieved, for Christ's sake. 

For Christ's sake: the phrase is so familiar to us 
that its freshness is exhausted. We have said it 

215 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



so often in hymns and worship that it has ceased 
to convey any definite meaning to our minds. "Never- 
theless it is one of the most striking phrases in the 
vocabulary of human thought. It records a revolu- 
tion in men's ideas of religion. It simplifies Chris- 
tianity, so that the humblest, and least subtle of mind, 
can understand it. It is the secret of Christ's hold 
upon the human race. 

Think of these two things to begin with : — 
First, that this phrase " For My sake " constitutes 
a motive for action which is quite peculiar to Chris- 
tianity. No other great religious teacher has ever 
told the world to do right for his sake ; but for right's 
sake and truth's sake. Neither Buddha nor Mo- 
hammed ever made the reception of the truths they 
taught contingent upon personal loyalty to them- 
selves ; they regarded their doctrine as potent enough 
to demand belief apart from all personal emotions. 
Neither did Paul, even when pleading with Iris con- 
verts with an almost womanly tenderness of feeling, 
ever beg them to pursue any given line of conduct 
for his sake ; the most he dared to say was that he in 
Christ's stead besought them to be reconciled to God. 
Alone, among all known religions, Christianity cen- 
tres in a person, makes its chief motive love to a per- 
son, and counts even the proper apprehension of 
truth as of less importance than warm and loyal 
passion to that person. The keynote of Christianity 

216 



PERSONAL FACTOR IN RELIGION 



is thus loyalty to Christ, and its two great watch- 
words are, "Lovest thou Me? " " Follow Me." 

A second outstanding characteristic of Christianity 
is, that pure and lofty as it is in point of ethics, yet 
those ethics would be relatively unimpressive without 
the character and story of Christ Himself. His pre- 
cepts are exquisite, but they gain all their real force 
from His own life. Others have told us to love our 
enemies, but it is only when we stand at the Cross and 
hear Him blessing a thief, and praying for His 
murderers that we comprehend what He meant. 
Others have taught us pity for the sinful, but the 
true scope of such a precept is only felt when we 
see Him eating and drinking with sinners, deliberately 
seeking their company, and saying to a guilt-laden 
woman, " Neither do I condemn thee, go in peace." 
And as it is with His precepts so it is with His 
doctrines. The benignant fatherhood of God becomes 
intelligible when we mark the perfect benignity of 
Christ's own character; and His great doctrine of 
immortality and life eternal passes from speculation 
into fact when we stand beside His own empty sepul- 
chre. Thus we may say that had Christ only given 
us what the man of genius gives us, the fine fruit 
of His mind, His teachings would have had little 
or no power to move the world, and none whatever to 
create a revolution in human thought. It is the 

217 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



spectacle of His own life and example that has fas- 
cinated the mind of men; and He Himself was well 
aware that the true and moving revelation He brought 
the world, was not so much what He taught, as what 
He was. In the phrase " For my sake " He makes 
love to Himself the one supreme and abiding motive 
of all Christian life, duty, and service. 

Now let me try to amplify and explain what these 
statements mean. Men are continually seeking, with 
insatiable curiosity, to understand what Christianity 
is, and what it really means to be a Christian. Books 
are written on it, sermons preached, lectures delivered 
in universities and seats of culture, and so extraordi- 
nary is the interest excited by this theme, that full 
as the world is with books about Christianity, every 
year adds a new library to Christian literature; and 
often as the theme has been discussed, no Sabbath 
dawns, when millions of men and women are not 
gathered together for a fresh discussion of the 
theme. Is it possible to compress all this mass of 
thought into some brief, clear, axiomatic form? 
Can I give to any man who asks the plain question 
" What is it to be a Christian ? " a plain answer, an 
answer clear, convincing, and decisive? I think I 
can. To be a Christian is to be brought into such 
personal relation with Christ that henceforth the 
soul is obedient to His authority, and all truth is 
seen through Christ, and the whole life is lived, in 

218 



PERSONAL FACTOR IN RELIGION 



all its acts and tempers, for Christ's sake. It is not 
a question of creed, dogmas, proofs, and evidences, 
but of personal relationship to Christ, and personal 
loyalty to Him. The personal factor is the con- 
trolling factor in the whole problem. Christianity 
is nothing more or less than the story of the human 
soul in its personal relationship to Christ; that is 
the centre, from which that wide line of circumference 
is drawn which includes literatures, philosophies, his- 
tories, and the long struggle of causes and nations. 

Think, for example, of the Personal Factor in 
Christ's own Earthly Ministry. 

The narrative of the earliest acts of that ministry 
is contained in the first chapter of St. John's Gospel, 
and it concerns itself with a group of five men in 
their personal relationship to Christ. 

Christ appears full of grace and truth before the 
startled and delighted eyes of John the Baptist, of 
Andrew, of Peter, of Philip and Nathaniel, and ex- 
cept in the case of Nathaniel not a word is spoken 
in exposition of Christ's claims or authority. 
Neither is there a single word spoken to either of 
the five men on any one of those distinctive doctrines 
which were to compose Christ's gospel. That gospel 
lies, as yet, folded in the silence of Christ's heart. 
No one of these men can by any possibility suspect 
what the outlines of that Gospel are to be. Yet 
what happens? Christ no sooner appears than their 
hearts cleave to Him. John hails Him as the Lamb 

219 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



of God ; Andrew and Peter leave their fishing nets 
instantly when He says " Follow Me " ; Philip makes 
haste to claim for Christ a Messiahship of which He 
Himself has said nothing, and Nathaniel exclaims, 
" Thou art the Son of God, Thou art the King of 
Israel." Not a word spoken by Christ, not a dogma 
nor a doctrine defined, not a word as to what kind of 
service it is to which He pledges these men, yet they 
follow Him instinctively, and why? Because they 
feel that Christ is the Gospel. Nothing He can say 
to them can affect them so much as what He is. 
They love Him as only noble souls can love; with a 
passion that forgets and extinguishes self ; with a 
swift and beautiful loyalty ; and thus the love of 
Christ constrains them henceforth to live only in 
the presence of Christ and for His sake. 

Try and recall for a moment the scenes of Christ's 
active ministry, and you will find that there is one 
characteristic which runs through all — His ministry 
is constantly addressed to individuals. There are ser- 
mons on the Mount and beside the Lake ; great public 
utterances such as you might expect from a religious 
reformer; but always something else, personal con- 
tact with individuals. Great multitudes followed 
Him in admiration, but His converts, the men and 
women who are to spread His doctrine and form the 
nucleus of His Church, are the results of His personal 
touch on individual lives. Mary Magdalene is won 
not by sermons on the Mount, but by the gracious 

220 



PERSONAL FACTOR IN RELIGION 



tender touch of Christ, which delivered her disordered 
mind from the cloud of madness, her haunted soul 
from the spectres of despair. The woman who is a 
sinner is drawn to Christ, not by the publication of 
His doctrines, which would have moved her not at all; 
but by the reverence and awe and penitent love He 
awoke in her by His mere presence, and this moved 
her to the depths. It is the same all through the 
ministry of Christ, from first to last; with Nicode- 
mus, with His disciples, with the dying thief; it is 
always Christ Himself, not the things He sa}'s, that 
overwhelms the soul ; it is the power of His own per- 
sonality acting on the souls of men, that draws them 
to Himself and changes the current of their lives. 

Notice also that in His ministry among men, 
Christ constantly uses the language of the affections. 
In the whole life of Christ, and in His whole ministry, 
what do you find the most distinctive thing, the 
unique thing, its feature, its characteristic? I find 
that it is the place He gives to love. It is of the 
love of God He speaks when He names God; it is 
loving-kindness in humble men He praises — the hun- 
gry fed, the sick comforted, the prisoner visited, the 
cup of cold water given to a child; these are the 
superlative acts of life by which character is revealed, 
by which eternal destinies are determined. It is the 
power of love in the heart of woman which He dis- 
tinguishes as woman's divinest gift. He defends 
Mary from the attack of Judas, because her ex- 

221 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



travagance is the beautiful extravagance of love; 
He forgives a woman, whose sins are many, because 
she loves much. And it is the language of the af- 
fections which He uses when He pleads with His 
followers, " Will ye also go away? " — when He says 
to Peter " Lovest thou me ? " — and when He makes 
Himself the universal object of all love by saying, 
" Inasmuch as men do kindnesses to those who are 
poor as He was poor, and hungry and thirsty, and in 
need, as He was in need, they do it unto Him." 

" For love He wrought, 
Who sowed with springing bloom our mortal graves. 
Only with hatred and its ills He fought, 
Claiming for seraphs those who toiled as slaves. 
For love He wrought. Be faith or clear or dim, 
He waits in love for all who follow Him." 

For my sake. Is it not the most intimate lan- 
guage of the affections that Christ uses here? " For 
my sake": the very phrase is sanctified by all the 
mystery and sweetness of human love. " For my 
sake 99 : it is the appeal of the dying mother to her 
child, of parted lovers between whom oceans are about 
to roll, of martyred patriots, surrendering their mem- 
ory and their cause to their disciples. No man has 
begun to live in any true or noble sense until he has 
begun to live for the sake of others. That is the 
supreme and simple truth of Christianity. Men must 
be lifted out of self-love, and they can only achieve 

222 



PERSONAL FACTOR IN RELIGION 



that deliverance through love for another. There- 
fore Christ speaks as a lover, and all that He can 
do for the souls of men is done when men love Him, 
and begin to live for His sake. This is the unique 
achievement of Christ. He is loved as no other was 
ever loved. This is what excited the wonder of Na- 
poleon when he said, " Caesar, Charlemagne and I 
have founded empires on force; they have perished; 
Jesus Christ founded an empire on love, and at this 
hour millions would die for Him." Here is the 
personal factor in Christianity, which so colours and 
controls everything, that all else is unimportant. 
Christ makes His appeal, " Live for my sake," and 
men through all the ages answer, " For me to live is 
Christ, to die is gain." 

Pass from the ministry of Christ, to that ministry 
which by common consent is next to Christ's the most 
wonderful in human history, the ministry of Paul. 
What do you find here that is extraordinary? Once 
more the personal factor, the personal relation be- 
tween Paul and Jesus, colouring every thought of the 
apostle and governing all his life. 

Paul had a very wide theology, and some of you 
may say, a very difficult and abtruse theology, 
ranging through many subtleties of the intellect, 
and penetrating the profoundest secrets of time and 
eternity. True, but you will find that wide as Paul's 
theology was, he had a very narrow and simple creed. 
He believed not more than two or three things, but 

223 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



he believed them intensely. The mission of his life 
was to go on repeating these two or three things till 
they were impressed upon the consciousness of man- 
kind. Before the Jewish Sanhedrin and Roman gov- 
ernors, in the conclave of the Apostles, and in the 
presence of the sceptical philosophers of Athens; in 
his familiar correspondence with his friends; in his 
controversial treatises, in his conversation with ac- 
quaintances made in travel, with soldiers who had 
charge of him, and officers of the empire sent to in- 
vestigate his case, he continually affirms the two or 
three things that made the creed on which his life 
was built. What were these things? That he had 
seen Christ in the spirit, and had heard the voice of 
Christ, which he had never heard in the flesh. That 
he knew Christ was risen from the dead, for he had 
felt the power of His resurrection. That his own 
life was changed in every fibre, and that he was con- 
verted, by the contact of Christ with his own soul. 
There is Paul's creed, the reality of contact with 
Christ. How little the teachings of Christ, consid- 
ered only as teachings, counted with Paul, you may 
judge by the strange fact that he does not quote a 
single parable of Christ's, or refer to a single inci- 
dent of the Galilean ministry, nor contribute any- 
thing whatever to our knowledge of His earthly life. 
Why was this? Because Paul's relation to Christ 
was not in the least like the ordinary relations of the 
scholar to the intellectual master, the scholar who 



PERSONAL FACTOR IN RELIGION 



expounds his master's philosophy, or re-defines his 
teaching. No, it is not the tradition of Christ's 
earthly life that shapes the life of Paul, it is daily, 
hourly contact with Christ. He has been lifted out 
of himself by a wave of love that has brought him 
to the bosom of Christ. He has found the love and 
life of Christ flowing into his own life and trans- 
figuring it. He not only believes what Christ has 
said in beatitude and parable, he knows Whom he has 
believed. And that is conversion — contact with 
Christ. It is not belief in something Christ has 
taught or done; it is surrender to Christ. It is the 
giving of the heart to Christ — that old evangelistic 
phrase which no change of thought can render ob- 
solete — an act performed in the realm of the affec- 
tions, a surrender to love, so that henceforth you live, 
not for self but for Christ, and for His sake. 

That old evangelistic theology had many phrases 
which were truer than we think, and as I grow older 
I begin to realise, how true they are. It spoke of 
coming to Jesus. It spoke of appropriating faith. 
It taught men to sing — 

" I the chief of sinners am, 
But Jesus died for me/' 

thus connecting my sin, done but yesterday, with the 
death of Jesus, suffered centuries ago upon the Tree. 
There is not one of these phrases that is not true, 

225 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



when you remember that the source of Christianity 
is personal contact with Christ. You do appropriate 
all the grace of Christ to yourself when you let your 
heart go out to Him in love. You do make His 
death a death for you, when you feel that He is not 
only the world's Saviour, but your Saviour. The 
Christ whom Paul knew, not by discussions about 
His person, or memories of His teachings, but by 
personal contact, spirit with spirit, soul to soul, in 
the rapture of love and self -surrender, may be known 
to you by the same means. Try the method, and 
see if it be not true. Let your heart choose Christ 
at this moment, and see if the answering love of 
Christ does not thrill you through and through. 
Centuries do not alter the fact of this experience; 
still Christ says " Love me, live for my sake," and 
still men rise from their knees to sing in a flood of 
happy tears — 

" 'Tis done, the great transaction's done. 
I am my Lord's, and He is mine, 
He called me and I followed on, 

Charmed to confess the Voice Divine." 

And then lastly I want you to realise the truth 
to which I have already referred, that in knowing 
Christ by personal contact, you for the first time know 
what His doctrine really means. Living for Christ's 
sake, you begin to see all life in and through Christ. 
This truth is admirably put by a man who cannot be 

226 



PERSONAL FACTOR IN RELIGION 



counted a friend of Christianity, Mr. Grant Allen, 
in his " Evolution of the Idea of God," when he says 
that it was not the doctrine of a Resurrection that 
converted Western Europe, but the fact that the 
Apostles of Christ said, " We tell you a tale of a 
real life, and recent: we present you with a specimen 
of actual resurrection." What can convince me of 
the Resurrection of Christ? Nothing but vital con- 
tact with Christ, when I am trying to live in the daily 
love of Christ, and for His sake. And thus living 
for Christ's sake all life is seen through Christ. I 
measure my daily duty by His spirit of duty, I 
interpret my disciplines by His Cross, I see my grave 
in the light of His illumined sepulchre. Living for 
Christ's sake, I more and more perceive that His 
life outlines mine, that which He knew of the Divine 
presence I may know, His way of thinking is my way, 
and His final victory over death will be my victory 
too. 

Everyone knows something of the beautiful and 
wonderful work of the Solar spectrum. Upon the 
spectrum are reproduced various lines, which until 
1860 were a puzzle to the astronomer. Then a 
discovery was made which cast a new light upon the 
universe, for it was found that these lines stood for 
certain elements in the sun, which exists also on the 
earth. Think of it, upon this tiny film, the sun, 
millions of miles as it is away, writes the record of its 
nature, and behold that nature is composed of the 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



same elements as this little earth. Even so Christ 
mirrors Himself upon the believing heart. He is far 
away, in the realms of risen life, yet His life cor- 
responds with ours. What were truths and duties, 
disciplines and victories for Him, are the same for 
us, and all our life lies explained in His, all our life 
is illumined "by the light of His most perfect life. 
The moment contact is established with Christ we see 
our life through Christ's life, and our life shines 
glorious in the light of His. 

The personal factor in religion ; practically for you 
and me no other factor counts. A thousand poets 
have written on love, but you will learn more of love in 
the kiss of a little child, in the pressure of a kind 
hand, in the soft glance of loyal and tender eyes, 
than you will in reading all the exquisite and all the 
true things written about love since the world began. 
It is so with Christ. Christianity is meaningless to 
you till you feel the contact of the soul with Christ: 

The love of Jesus, what it is, 
None but His loved ones know. 

In one of the greatest spiritual confessions of our 
generation, " The Story of an African Farm," Olive 
Schreiner pours out her heart in this exceeding bitter 
cry. 

" Why am I alone, so hard, so cold? It is eating 
my soul to the core, self, self, self! I cannot bear 
this life! I cannot breathe! I cannot live! Will 

228 



PERSONAL FACTOR IN RELIGION 



nothing free me from myself? I want something 
great and pure to lift me to itself." 

Christ is the answer to that cry. Love for Him 
is the great and pure passion that lifts us out of 
self. All that bitter loneliness which tortured the 
soul of the brilliant writer, would have passed away 
forever, had she known how to kneel at the Cross 
of Christ. To give the heart to Christ, to surrender 
the whole soul to Him, to come to Jesus, to live for 
Christ's sake — once more I say the old Evangelistic 
phrases ring true, they rest upon the experience of 
millions, and may be true to you also, if you will act 
upon them. " Come unto Me, and I will give you 
rest," — rest in deliverance from self, rest in sur- 
render to God — so Christ speaks still, so He speaks 
to you, all ye who are weary and heavy-laden, and 
may God give you grace to find the peace and joy 
of the life surrendered to your Saviour, and hence- 
forth lived in His service,, and for His sake. 



229 



THE POWER OF PRINCIPLE 



0 




XIII 



THE POWER OF PRINCIPLE 

" How then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against 
God." — Gen. xxxix. 9. 

THOSE who write and speak especially to youth 
have often drawn up interesting categories of 
its qualities and characteristics — its energy, sin- 
cerity, buoyancy, unbounded aspiration, and so forth ; 
they have not so often observed that youth is pecu- 
liarly the period of temptation. The man who has 
attained to middle age, if he be not altogether a fool, 
has usually attained to some degree of sober wisdom, 
but sobriety is not among the gifts of youth. Rather 
youth is the period of inebriation, of excess, of ex- 
travagance, when nothing is seen in its real outlines, 
or apprehended in its true nature. The first full 
draught of life which a man drinks is not only ex- 
hilarating — it is intoxicating. It is bliss to be alive ; 
all the world shines transfigured through a golden 
mist, and is as a mirage in which the very pits of 
Sodom are magically made to take the outline of the 
Delectable Mountains themselves. It is small wonder 
that in this general ferment and tumult of the na- 
ture, youth should find itself allured by a thousand 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



temptations. To taste, to see, to handle, to know 
what life is; to experience the things of which men 
have written and talked ; to drink the cup of pleasure 
to the dregs; to enjoy, before the evil days come 
when the tired and satiated heart says, " I have no 
pleasure in them " ; to plunge deep into the stinging 
tide of all human experience — all this appeals irre- 
sistibly to the frank paganism of youth. And thus 
it is that youth, in its first delirium of living often 
rushes straight towards ruin, and before it has had 
time to count the cost, knows itself bankrupt of those 
qualities which give life its true serenity and triumph. 

Now that which is true of all youth, was no doubt 
true of Joseph. In that far-gone period when he 
lived, moral restraint was much weaker than it is 
to-day, and the mere pagan joy of life proportion- 
ately stronger. Consider what it meant for such a 
youth to be suddenly introduced to the corrupting and 
luxurious life of Egypt. From the simple patri- 
archal life of the plains he was violently separated by 
a series of bitter vicissitudes. He was a peasant of 
genius, suddenly made a citizen of a complex civili- 
sation ; and such an instance as that of Robert Burns 
may serve to remind us of the grave perils of the 
position. If he had ever sighed for a larger life 
than that of the agriculturist and cattle breeder, 
now he had it. If he had ever felt his veins athirst 
for the pleasures of life, now that thirst might be 
easily gratified. He was among a people who loved 

234 



THE POWER OF PRINCIPLE 

pleasure, and who knew little of sin. The standards 
by which they measured life were wholly different 
from those to which he had been accustomed. Prob- 
ably there was not one among his acquaintances who 
would not have laughed at his scruples, and have 
jeeringly told him to do in Egypt as Egypt did. 
If you would discover the place in which life is most 
corrupt, morals most easy, the desires of the flesh 
least restrained, you would go first to the precincts 
of a Court where luxury, idleness, and the sense of 
being freed from the ordinary social restrictions 
are nearly always found, and it was in such an at- 
mosphere Joseph lived. The peasant of genius in 
the house of Potiphar — conceive the situation. How 
easy to snatch at forbidden pleasures, which not one 
of his acquaintances would have resisted or would 
have even thought it politic to resist. But Joseph 
did resist, and as the sequel showed his whole future 
life and the existence of his people, depended on his 
resistance. Of course he did not know that; no 
man is able to foresee that he is making history. 
But one thing he did know — he knew what right and 
wrong were, and he knew that he was accountable 
to God for all his actions. His first instinctive words 
are, " How can I do this great wickedness, and sin 
against God? " And when we come to weigh these 
words, ■ and measure the whole situation, what we 
see is this: that the whole secret of Joseph's triumph 
was that he was a youth of principle. That was 

235 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



what saved him in the trying hour; that is what 
can alone save us in the moments of great tempta- 
tion — he had principles and he was faithful to them. 

First of all, What then is Principle? Is it some- 
thing elemental, fundamental, which is taken for 
granted in all reasoning, and thus becomes a standard 
of thought or conduct. In every science you have 
principles, and until these are accepted science can 
teach you nothing. In every art you have princi- 
ples, and until you have mastered these, accepted 
these, and throned them as unalterable, no knowl- 
edge of art is possible. Euclid gives you the prin- 
ciples of mathematics before he proposes the problem, 
for it is by the application of the principles that the 
problems are to be solved. You may have plenty 
of aspiration for art or science, but the first ele- 
ment of progress is not aspiration, but obedience. 
So in the affairs of the soul, there are fundamental 
and axiomatic things which we must admit before 
we can give any right shape to conduct; for re- 
ligion is not primarily an aspiration, but a sub- 
mission or an obedience. Joseph had a sure grasp 
on two principles ; that he was accountable to God 
for his actions, and that certain actions were wicked ; 
and in the most tremendous hour of moral crisis 
which he knew he was saved by these principles. 

We sometimes say of a man, " He is an unprin- 
cipled man"; what is it we mean? We mean that 
he is unscrupulous. There is hardly a more damn- 

236 



THE POWER OF PRINCIPLE 

ing epithet that can be applied to a human creature. 
Such a man proves himself in every relation of life 
utterly untrustworthy and unreliable. If he be a 
business man there is no knavery which he will not 
practise on occasion ; if he sign an agreement to-day 
he will set to work to-morrow to repudiate it, or 
make it nugatory ; if you trust him, he betrays you ; 
if you confide your interests to him he will sacrifice 
them the moment self-interest interferes ; and not 
because he deliberately means to be a knave or a 
thief but simply because there is no fundamental 
honesty about him, which gives a governing principle 
to conduct. If he be a workman, he works only 
when the master's eye is upon him; he puts honest 
work only where it can be seen, and goes home 
whistling from his knavish work, utterly careless of 
the fact that he has built a house or laid a drain in 
such a way that the lives of men and women must 
be sacrificed to his purposed incompetency. If he 
be a politician he learns to lie so glibly that he 
hardly knows when he lies; he uses any weapon that 
comes to his hand without a thought of its nature; 
he drifts into wars which a moment of firm thought 
might have prevented, and in the long run he does 
his country more lasting damage than could be 
wrought by the wildest anarchist, or the most revolu- 
tionary of honest demagogues. And when you come 
to the social aspects of life, the wrongs wrought by 
lack of principle are even more agonising though 

237 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



perhaps more circumscribed in their effects. George 
Eliot has sketched us such a man with inimitable 
skill in the Tito Melema of her great novel, " Ro- 
mola." She takes pains to show us that Tito was 
not, in the ordinary sense of the term, a bad man. 
He has many engaging and quite fascinating qualities. 
He is brilliant, joyous, refined, fond of giving 
pleasure to others, and eager to make himself friendly 
and serviceable. But in his heart he has no prin- 
ciple, no love of virtue, no respect for duty. The 
moment his personal interests are menaced he turns 
to adamant. To save himself he will sacrifice any- 
one; at the root of all his gaiety and fascinating 
manners, there is an utterly unscrupulous self-in- 
terest. He is no libertine, but he will ruthlessly 
wreck the life of the little blue-eyed contadina who 
pleases him with her child-like ways. He is not a 
brute; yet he will cast off his benefactor — with real 
regret — the moment his presence becomes inconven- 
ient. He does not wish to betray or injure any- 
one; he would much rather not do it; but he has no 
real principle of honour or of virtue to deter him 
from the course that seems pleasant or expedient. 
And so the man goes through life wrecking the peace 
of all who know him, and finally is wrecked himself 
■ — and why ? For want of principle. Had he but 
known how to say, " This is wickedness and sin 
against God " — had he learned to set his daily con- 
duct in the light of God's purity, and said, " How 

238 



THE POWER OF PRINCIPLE 



can I sin against God? " all would have been differ- 
ent, and both for himself and others infinite sorrow 
and infinite tragedy might have been averted. 

We see, then, what Principle means; it means a 
moral and spiritual standard which is sincerely ac- 
cepted and rigidly obeyed. It gives us a power of 
moral discrimination, and enables us to say, " This 
may be a pleasure, but it is also wickedness." It 
gives us an awe-struck sense of responsibility to the 
unseen God, and enables us to say, " How can I 
sin against God? " And it becomes clear at once 
that such a principle working in a man's heart, such 
a moral standard obediently accepted, must necessarily 
alter and exalt the whole nature of a man's conduct. 
The business man knows then that the eye of God is 
on his ledger, and the workman makes his work good 
because he would feel himself dishonoured if he did 
not. The statesman in hours of difficulty consoles 
himself that certain things are inevitably and eternally 
right ; that it is better to fail in the right than to suc- 
ceed in the wrong; and that while expediency is 
man's wisdom, righteousness is God's. The ordinary 
man in all the social tests of life is lifted beyond the 
reach of temptations which offer momentary pleasures 
and advantages, because he sees life in a nobler per- 
spective and has learned the inner joy of a virtue that 
is unstained, and an integrity which is uncorrupted. 
To such men right and wrong are no sounding 
phrases, they are the only abiding realities. Eternity 

289 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



and the thought of eternal things, becomes to them 
at once inspiration, restraint, and impulse. And so 
when they are suddenly brought face to face with 
some great temptation; when the Venus-vision of 
the flesh flashes on their startled eyes, when the sweet 
corrupt odours of forbidden pleasure assail their 
senses, when the snare is spread for the feet, and the 
bait held at their lips — they have a power by which 
they conquer, they have a spell before which the 
Venus-vision melts into thin air — they are able to 
fall back upon their sense of right, their sense of 
God, and to say, " How can I do this wickedness, 
and sin against God? 99 And they cannot do it; they 
simply can not ; because a higher power holds them 
in its grasp, and a nobler vision gives them instant 
mastery over the base and the corrupting vision. 

So much, perhaps, we accept and acknowledge; 
but now notice another thing, viz.: That it is only 
by moral principle that men conquer in such hours 
as these. It is as impossible to acquire sudden virtue 
as sudden heroism. Behind every human act there 
lies a history, and the act is the fruit of the history. 
Grapes do not grow upon thorns, nor figs on thistles, 
said J esus — by which He meant that character rules 
conduct. Men do not always remember this. They 
suppose that if a great temptation came to them they 
would find some sort of magical power to resist it. 
But a man never finds in his heart the flower he has 
not planted there ; he never finds the grape upon the 

240 



THE POWER OF PRINCIPLE 



thorn, or the fig upon the thistle. All principle 
means a slow accretion of will, thought and convic- 
tion ; the gradual emergence from the fermenting 
chaos of a man's nature of the solid and impregnable 
elements on which he can build end rest; and in the 
great crises of temptation it is only by force of 
principle that we can be saved. 

We see how true this is when we remember that 
all great temptations are sudden. On that memor- 
able day when Joseph faced the great temptation of 
his life, he faced it without warning. There was 
not a hint in that fair Egyptian dawn that anything 
tragic was about to happen. No fellow-servant or 
officer of the household had breathed a word to put 
him on his guard. He rose as he had done on a 
hundred other mornings; rejoicing in his strength, 
full of the gladness of life, warmed and nerved by 
ambitious dreams, already seeing his life successful; 
he rose, and prayed to the God of Israel, and went 
about his duties in a quiet glow of health and energy. 
If he had known what was about to happen he might 
have braced himself for the hour, and have called 
up all the resources of his prudence and his will. 
But life gives very few of us the chance of invent- 
ing a deliberate strategy against a coming battle. 
We are taken unawares; we must fight as we stand. 
The days of destiny come, but they cast no shadow 
before. A man goes out in the morning to the city 
utterly ignorant that before night the great battle 

241 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



of his life will be fought. He goes out honest — 
he may come back a thief ; he goes out virtuous 
— he may come back with a stain upon him that all 
his after life may not obliterate. The subtle antag- 
onist y/ith whom we have to deal gives us no time 
for preparation; he delights in surprises; the bolt 
falls out of the blue sky, the arrow flies through 
the clearest noon. Is it not plain then that to be 
prepared at all for temptation, we must be always 
prepared? And how are we to be prepared but by 
that daily, hourly attitude of mind which makes 
virtue dear to us and God real? And what does this 
mean but that it is principle alone that can save us 
in the sudden shock? If Joseph had had to begin to 
be religious on that fateful morning, nothing could 
have saved him ; it was because he was religious, be- 
cause he had lived his young life in stainless virtue, 
that he had resources to fall back on now, and stood 
fast in the evil day. 

There is perhaps nothing in life more tragic than 
these sudden and overwhelming moral defeats which 
happen to men. It is no exaggeration to say that 
often enough a moment decides a destiny. A man 
rises without the least purpose of wrong-doing in 
his thoughts ; he has lived in prudent virtue all his 
days; yet by nightfall he has done that which makes 
him loathe himself. We who look upon the amazing, 
the tragic spectacle, cannot understand it. We hear 
the growing whisper that couples his name with in- 

242 



THE POWER OF PRINCIPLE 



famy, and we say, " It is impossible, it is incredible ! " 
But usually there is no mystery in it at all; if we 
had known the man better we should not be incredu- 
lous. And when we do get at the real facts of the 
case all mystery disappears. We find then that 
there has been a long process of sapping and under- 
mining before the crash came; that the man never 
really had a love of virtue or a detestation of vice; 
that he had been accustomed to read books which 
peopled his mind with corrupting images; that he 
had played with fire in his thoughts a thousand times ; 
that his virtue was a part of his clothes, not a thing 
inherent in himself ; that his religion was at best 
an aesthetic emotion: that, in fact, he had not a 
single, clearly defined principle which he could call 
his own. A building will stand a long time after it 
is undermined ; so a man may stand a long time with- 
out any solid foundation of principle. But some 
day the undermined house falls all at once, and great 
is the fall of it — and this is, in brief, the usual 
history of those tragic downfalls, those sudden and 
total collapses of character and reputation, which to 
the outsider seem so incredible and amazing. 

I say that men do not realise this fact, and it is 
because they do not, that they court defeat upon the 
battlefield of life. Thus, perhaps, some one says, 
" But surely prudence would be sufficient to save a 
man in such a crisis," and it is by no means uncom- 
mon to find men arguing that morality is really only 

243 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



a code of prudence after all. No doubt it is tine 
that a man in his sane mind can readily perceive that 
certain sins are highly imprudent; no doubt also 
morality finds a certain sanction in prudence. But 
if virtue be nothing more than a glorified instinct 
of prudence, it will be of small avail when the in- 
flamed blood of youth surges through the brain. 
Besides, the sin may appear so secret and so incapa- 
ble of discovery that prudence may have nothing to 
say against it ; and in any case the man who trusts 
to prudence only, will find himself arguing with the 
tempter, which is always the first step in submitting 
to the temptation. No ! merely prudential consider- 
ations, however plain, are not strong enough to save 
us; and are especially inapplicable to youth, whose 
temper is usually at the furthest possible remove 
from prudence. Or, again, a man may say, " A 
spirit of true culture will preserve men from suc- 
cumbing to such gross temptations as this of 
Joseph's." Will it? Alas, there is no delusion more 
absurd, and none so absolutely contradicted by the 
facts of life. No doubt culture is of great use in 
human discipline ; it redeems the mind from empti- 
ness, it surrounds it with a zone of intellectual in- 
terests, it creates a certain fastidiousness of taste 
which is offended by a temptation that is wholly gross 
and vulgar. But what if the temptation be neither 
gross nor vulgar? What if Venus wears the gar- 
ments of the Angel of Light ? And what of the men 

244 



THE POWER OF PRINCIPLE 



who in every age have joined culture of the mind 
with corruption of morals, fine manners with in- 
famous vices, the thoughts of the Philosopher with 
the acts and habits of the Satyr? 

Only a week or two ago, I heard of the case of 
a man, well-born, well-bred, highly educated, and on 
the brink of marriage, who in a single week drank 
himself to death in circumstances of unspeakable in- 
famy. This man was a scholar, with a cultivated 
taste for the best forms of literature; he read his 
Greek Testament day by day, and when his books 
were examined after his death they consisted mainly 
of books on religion, curiously mixed with the filth- 
iest of French novels. Exactly what happened to 
send him to his tragic end with such rapidity no one 
will ever know ; but it was clear that a sudden temp- 
tation had overwhelmed him, and that neither the 
fastidious taste of the gentleman nor the culture of 
the scholar had had the least power to restrain him 
from plunging into the abyss. And when I think 
of the Greek Testament and the scrofulous French 
novel lying side by side in that man's library, I see 
another thing, that mere religiosity has as little 
power to save men from gross sin as culture. Do not 
suppose that because you go to church you are any 
the less likely to be overwhelmed in the evil hour. 
Do not imagine because you take a certain intellectual 
interest in religion, you are safe from the fiery darts 
of the wicked one. Joseph might have been the 

245 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



most cultured man in Egypt and the most interested 
student of her religion, but neither of these things 
would have saved him from a seduction so potent, 
so terrible, and so unexpectedly thrust upon him. 
Xo ! once more I say, principle, and principle alone 
can save you in such hours as these. You must have 
something fundamental on winch you can fall back 
— a belief , a conviction, a habit of thought ; and 
this Joseph had. He knew the thing was wicked — 
that was enough; he knew that God would see what 
he did, and he dared not sin under the very eye of 
God. " How can I do this great wickedness, and 
sin against God? ; ' he cried, and what neither pru- 
dence nor culture could have done for him, religious 
principle did. 

There is yet one final train of thought suggested 
by this episode in the life of Joseph. There can be 
no doubt it was part of the discipline he endured in 
achieving that final greatness of character -which made 
him one of the most memorable men in human history. 
The superficial man will probably say, " Why are 
such temptations permitted in a world where God is 
supposed to rule? If God wishes me to be pure, 
why doesn't He keep me pure? ?J Simply because 
you are a man, not a puppet, and because purity 
cannot truly be said to exist without the conquest 
of impurity, as light cannot be said to exist without 
darkness. We have all seen a boy sail a kite. The 
kite soars against the wind, and the tighter the string 

246 



THE POWER OF PRINCIPLE 



is held the harder the kite tugs at it, and the higher 
it soars. So it is with us; we can hardly be said 
to possess virtue till we find ourselves in active oppo- 
sition with something that is not virtue. When the 
kite sails with a loose string it drops, because there 
is not enough opposition to keep it afloat; and when 
men have no odds against them in life, nothing to 
draw out their vital force of opposition, they also 
soon trail along the ground. This is the meaning 
of temptation ; it is discipline. We do not enter the 
world ready-made; we are engaged in the making of 
ourselves, and in the process, temptation must needs 
play a tremendous part. To blame temptation, 
therefore, is merely childish and foolish, for what 
great life has ever yet been lived that did not grapple 
with the ghostly adversary, and win its greatness out 
of wrong resisted, evil overcome? And if we do not 
yet realise this, if we weakly blame circumstances 
instead of ourselves for our misdoings, let this great 
saying of St. Bernard's bring correction and invig- 
oration to our minds. " Nothing can work me dam- 
age, except myself. The harm that I sustain I carry 
about in me; and never am a real sufferer but by my 
own fault." 

And so the last truth which emerges from this 
story is that character is fate, to quote a well-known 
aphorism of Novalis. There is nothing fortuitous in 
such battles as this which Joseph fought; they are 
determined solely by character. What are we? 

Ml 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 

What equipment do we bring to the struggle? We 
may not be tempted precisely as Joseph was, but no 
man passes through life without his terrible hours of 
testing and temptation. And again I remind you 
that such hours come suddenly. We have no time 
to debate then, how we shall meet them ; they are 
upon us before we know it. If the secrets of all 
hearts in this congregation were revealed; if we 
dared to speak of the things which we ourselves have 
known ; how many of us could bear witness to these 
sudden temptations which break on the soul like the 
black squall upon a summer sea ; and how many of 
us would shudder at the thought of how nearly we 
made shipwreck of life? Brethren, what saved us 
then, and what alone had power to save us? Simply 
this ; the power of principle. It may be that we had 
absolutely nothing else on which we could rely. 
Perhaps the great temptation overtook us in a time 
when the intellectual difficulties of religion had 
proved too great for us, and all the old theologies 
in which we had been bred, had melted away. But 
we had something left — a stubborn conviction that 
nothing could make wickedness other than wicked, 
that God remained as the real witness and judge of 
our life, demanding truth in the inward parts, and 
we could say as F. W. Robertson said, " After find- 
ing littleness where I expected nobleness, and impur- 
ity where I thought there was spotlessness, again and 
again I despaired of the reality of goodness. But 

248 



THE POWER OF PRINCIPLE 



in all that struggle the bewilderment never told upon 
my conduct. Moral goodness and moral beauty are 
realities — they are no dream ; and they are not mere 
utilitarian conveniences." And to say that is a great 
thing; yet a thing we all may say. It is a weapon 
which is invincible, a spell before which the most 
alluring vision of evil melts away. Brother, cleave 
to that ; be sure that whatever changes, right and 
wrong change not; that though creeds may take a 
thousand forms, these have but one; and in your 
darkest, weakest, most tragic hour, learn to look up 
and say : — 

So near is glory to the dust, 

So nigh is God to man, 
When duty whispers low — Thou must, 

The youth replies — I can. 

How can I do this great wickedness, and sin 
against God? 



249 



CHAMBERS OF IMAGERY 



XIV 

CHAMBERS OF IMAGERY 

" What the ancients of the house of Israel do in the dark, 
everyone in the chambers of his imagery." — Ezekiel viii. 12. 

THE chambers of imagery — a striking, sug- 
gestive phrase. It refers primarily to the 
practise of idolatry among the Israelites. 

There were painted chambers, on whose walls all 
kinds of creatures associated with idolatry were de- 
picted — 

The shape of beasts and creeping things, 
The body that availeth not. 

There were pictures, too, of pagan deities, and all 
the voluptuous life of paganism — 

Shapes on either wall, 
Sea-coloured from some rare blue shell 
At many a Tyrian interval, 
Horsemen on horses, girdled well, 
Delicate and desirable. 

And in these secret chambers of imagery the heart 
of even the ancients of Israel grew corrupt. The 
Mosaic law practically forbade art, when it forbade 

MS 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



the likeness being made of any living creature ; and 
the Mosaic law still maintains this restriction, so that 
art among the Mohammedan races is confined to grace- 
ful intricate lines and arabesques ; geometrical designs, 
but never the human form. It is hard for us to 
understand this restriction, but it is explained by the 
nature of the Oriental mind. Voluptuousness is one 
of the distinct characteristics of the Oriental, and 
among such races art soon becomes the servant of 
voluptuousness. The chamber of imagery was the 
picture gallery of a prostituted art; and from these 
chambers streamed forth the corruption of the nation. 

These ancient idolatries have long since passed 
away, and the ancients of Israel no longer worship 
toward the East, uttering the name of Baal ; and the 
women of Israel no longer weep for the Adonis of 
Greek Mythology, under another name, whose story 
was used to breed and inflame all the degenerate de~ 
sires of the human heart. The ancient idolatries 
pass, but the spirit of idolatry is not so easily de- 
stroyed, and we still have our chambers of imagery. 
Our chamber of imagery is not built with hands, it 
is within ourselves. It is painted with no colours of 
human art; our thoughts are the artists, and our 
fancies are the things they paint. There is an inner 
life which we all live, so closely hidden from the 
world, that those who know us best, little suspect 
its nature and character. There is a secret chamber 
of the mind, the chamber of our imagination, where 

254 



CHAMBERS OF IMAGERY 



we live a life, to which the world holds no clue. Our 
real life is the life of our thought, our hope, our 
desire. And our thoughts are forever painting for 
us pictures which allure and delight us, which per- 
haps disgrace and debase us. In the mind of the 
saint hang sacred pictures, pictures of sacrifice, de- 
votion, and heroic death ; in the mind of the avaricious 
man, pictures of senseless opulence; in the mind of 
the profligate, pictures of extravagant and evil 
pleasures ; in the mind of the ambitious man, pictures 
of immense triumph, world-wide coronation, endless 
power. From infancy to old age we dwell with these 
visions. Punished or neglected of the world, we re- 
tire into our chambers of imagery, and solace our- 
selves with the sweet delusion of our dreams. The 
dream-picture that thus glimmers perpetually on the 
walls of the imagination may be a seduction to our 
worse selves ; it may be an impulse to our best selves ; 
so that we may say, 

All my days I'll go the softlier, sadlier 
For that dream's sake. 

But, whatever the nature of our dream-pictures, this 
is true of all of them, they rule us. Our imagination 
is the most potent element in our lives. It is in the 
chamber of imagery that our real life is lived, for 
what we desire, that we seek ; what we covet, that we 
pursue ; what we think, that we are. 

The first thing I ask you to observe then, is that 
255 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



we are the custodians of this inner and secret life, as 
well as of the outer and open life. 

That we are the custodians of the outer life we all 
admit, and hence the great stress which the world 1 
lays on what is called behaviour. We know perfectly 
well that it is to our interest to exercise a sedulous 
care over the outward life. Hence, if we have any 
desire to succeed in life — and who has not this de- 
sire ? — we cultivate the mind, we cultivate the grace 
of good manners, we cultivate the body that it may 
be efficient for its duties; so that externally, at least, 
we may become persons acceptable to our fellow- 
creatures. And there, you will observe, all that the 
world has to teach us about the custody of ourselves, 
stops. Among the great races of antiquity, bodily 
symmetry and beauty were the chief things; and to 
achieve physical perfection was to attain the ultimate 
reward of public praise. Among the ruling classes 
of the eighteenth century to be a man of honour was 
a sufficient passport to society, and honour in this 
case meant nothing more than a sufficient code of 
good behaviour. Among large classes of our fellow 
men to-day we find that to fulfil a certain social code 
is the one thing in demand; but all scrutiny of 
private morals is discouraged, and regarded as an 
unjust inquisition. Thus the inner life is generally 
ignored, and we are taught to ignore it. What did 
the Greek care for the private life of the athlete who 
won the applause of the populace by his physical 

256 



CHAMBERS OF IMAGERY 



beauty? What did the eighteenth century society 
care for the secret follies of its statesmen and its 
leaders, so long as they paid their betting debts, their 
debts of honour as they were called, and obeyed the 
lax conventions of superficial propriety? What 
does the world care still for the private life of the 
society queen, who charms men by her beauty, of the 
actress who pleases them by her art, or the man of 
genius who delights them with his gifts? And if you 
ask how it is that we come to reason thus, is it not 
because we have never grasped the truth that we are 
the custodians of an inner life, as well as an outward? 
We are responsible not only for our behaviour but 
for our souls. We have entrusted to us not only our 
body, not only the kind of man which is seen and 
judged by the physical eye, but an inner self, our 
thoughts, our emotions, our desires, our imagination. 
When we have regulated our conduct to society by 
the strictest code the world can give us, we have done 
but a very little thing ; the great thing remaining to 
be done is to regulate our inner life before God, and 
to make that chamber of imagery where all our secret 
life is lived, a temple and a shrine. 

Let me try to put the matter even more plainly. 
What is it I mean when I say that we have the cus- 
tody over an inner life, as well as an outer? I mean 
that we have to determine what we think, as well as 
what we do, that we are responsible for the nature 
of our imaginations as well as of our acts. 

257 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



That touches us more nearly, because very many 
of us assume that we have no control over our imag- 
inative life. The pictures in the chamber of imagery 
paint themselves, we do not paint them. Visions of 
evil, infinitely seductive, float into the mind, we know 
not whence or how. We think that we have no re- 
sponsibility for them, no more responsibility than 
the fertile earth has for the wind-blown thistle seed 
which may fall upon it, and because we think thus 
we make no effort to resist impure visions, or restrain 
evil ones. And so it happens that men whose out- 
ward lives are virtuous, often indulge themselves in 
evil visions, without so much as suspecting that they 
sin in doing it. Nay, more; they compensate them- 
selves for the strictness of their outward virtue, by 
the riot of their secret thought. The}' turn to the 
chamber of imagery with an unconfessed delight, 
they abandon themselves to the seduction of thoughts 
they would not dare to utter, they act out in the 
theatre of the mind, dramas which would horrify them 
if they were transposed to the theatre of conduct. 
And if you question them on such things, they will 
say at once, " It surely matters little what I think, 
so long as my thought does not become an act. 
And under any circumstance I cannot control my 
thought, my fancy, and my imagination — these act 
for themselves independently of my will or my 
desire." 

The answer to such arguments is threefold. Eirst, 
258 



CHAMBERS OF IMAGERY 



we have to remember that our imagination is extra- 
ordinarily sensitive, it is the most sensitive part of 
our nature, and therefore it is the point where sin 
attacks us first. There is a little instrument known 
to science as the radiometer. It is a tiny weather- 
cock with a silver side to it; and so sensitive is it to 
light, that when the slightest beam of light impinges 
upon it, even though it is but the light of a candle 
many yards away, it begins slowly to revolve. In 
the same way the imagination is exquisitely sensitive, 
and that which stirs the imagination stirs the whole 
man. Set the imagination revolving, and its move- 
ment is at once communicated to the whole life. 

Again, we have to recollect that debasement of any 
kind begins in debasement of imagination. We 
all remember how a great painter said that he never 
dared to look upon a bad picture, because for days 
afterwards it influenced him so powerfully that he 
could not paint well. He was deflected from true art 
by the mere memory of bad art, his draughtsmanship 
and colour suffered instantly, even by the recollection 
of an art which was inferior. Can it be a light 
thing, then, if we fill our chamber of imagery with 
bad pictures? Does not conduct instantly shape 
itself in correspondence with the imagination? Is 
not the thing we think in our private hours the com- 
pelling curve along which our public acts are bound 
to move? 

And then we must remember, too, that the wisest 
259 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 

men have always recognised the danger of unre- 
strained imagination, and have claimed and exercised 
power to restrain it. If there be any virtue, think 
of these things, the things that are pure, lovely, and 
of good report, says St. Paul. You can think on 
them; it is a matter of will; and you can refuse to 
think on impure and unlovely things — that also is 
a matter of will. The door of the imagination does 
not stand wide open to all comers ; and you, who 
would at once close the door of your home against 
the intrusion of the rabble, have you no power to 
close the door of the mind against the rabble thoughts 
that defile it? You have that power; you may be 
master of your thoughts if you will, even as you are 
master of your speech, and master of your habits; 
and against all the poor sophistry which assumes the 
inability of the imagination to defend itself, which 
claims that the pictures on the walls paint themselves, 
which disclaims responsibility for them, and treats 
them as of small account, stand those facts of life to 
which all wise men bear witness, that we can help what 
we think, and that it is of the highest moment that 
we should watch our thoughts, since what we think 
we are. " Let no man say when he is tempted, I am 
tempted of God; for God cannot be tempted with evil, 
neither tempteth He any man, but every man is 
tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust and 
enticed." Consider that saying of St. James and 
then you will see that it is neither God nor Satan who 

260 



CHAMBERS OF IMAGERY 



paints the picture on the wall; we are the artists and 
the audience, we are the tempter and the tempted, we 
are the sinners and the victims. 

Chambers of imagery. How ought we to think of 
our imaginations? Let us turn to Scripture for a 
moment that we may understand how we ought to 
think of our imaginations. There are many things 
in the Bible on which we may hold divergent views, 
but there is one thing on which we can scarcely dis- 
agree — the essential truth of the estimate of human 
nature which the Bible gives us. The Bible alone 
of all great books in the world does not flatter man. 
Some of you will perhaps recollect how Browning 
deals with this truth in one of his most striking 
poems. He pictures to us a woman who hid under 
the smile of a saint, a sordid vice which was not dis- 
covered till she was dead. And then he goes on to 
say that here is an illustration of all that Christianity 
has to say about original sin. It is the fashion, he 
says, of modern teachers to flatter men ; to take rose- 
water views of life; to proclaim how radically good 
man is ; but not so Christianity, she 

launched point-blank her dart, 
At the head of a lie ; taught original sin, 
The corruption of man's heart. 

And when the Bible speaks of man's heart it means 
his imagination. The accusation God makes against 
man is, that " every imagination of the thoughts of 

261 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



his heart is only evil continually." It is in the cham- 
ber of imagery that all the corruption of human life 
begins. 

Take the decalogue. There are ten commandments, 
eight of which have to do with outward conduct. 
Then comes the tenth, the last, the consummating 
commandment, the top of this great staircase of 
morality, and what is the tenth commandment? Thou 
shalt not covet — something that grows in the mind 
and the imagination. You may remove at a stroke 
three commandments that precede it: they are un- 
necessary if the tenth be kept, for without the picture 
of things we covet which inflame the imagination, who 
would kill or steal or commit adultery? " Covetous- 
ness, which is idolatry," says the Apostle, and is not 
the definition accurate? And is it not in the chambers 
of imagery that we accustom ourselves to these visions 
which translate themselves on some apt opportunity 
into murder, theft, and adultery, into false witness 
which smooths the path of our ambition, into the 
dishonour shown to parents who are a hindrance to 
our pride, or the contempt of the Sabbath that we 
may squeeze a little more work or a little more pleasure 
out of our days : into that making of graven images, 
before which we bow down at last and worship, even 
as the ancients of Israel bowed down before the painted 
figures on the wall? Thou shalt not covet — it is the 
sum of all the commandments, and coveting is not an 

262 



CHAMBERS OF IMAGERY 



act ; it is a temper, it is a process of the imagination, 
it is a thing so secret to ourselves that none but our- 
selves know that it exists. 

Take, again, that most striking parable of Christ's, 
the Empty House, which is surely the House of the 
Mind and Imagination. Behold the house swept and 
garnished, for by a violent effort the man has stopped 
the riot of his thoughts, he has closed the drama, he 
has driven the actors out into the darkness. Here 
at least is the hint of man's power over his inner life, 
a hint that has been acted on by multitudes of men 
who have sought to scourge themselves into purity, 
to reduce the mind into emptiness rather than allow it 
licence, to break up the whole mechanism of life in a 
desperate effort to resist the temptations of life. But 
then follows something infinitely more subtle ; Christ 
says you cannot keep the house of the Imagination 
empty. It is not enough to draw the disfiguring 
brush over the painted wall; the eye resents mere 
blankness. There are other pictures that must be 
painted there, there is a noble drama that must be 
enacted if you would forget the ignoble, for evil is 
only overcome with good. This is what the man of 
the parable forgets, and so the expelled actors, finding 
the house empty, come back, re-inforced and clamor- 
ous by exile, and the last state of that man is worse 
than the first. Look at that parable, and do you not 
at once "see that it is a mental state which it describes? 

W3 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



Do you not feel that Christ means it to be a solemn 
lesson on the use and perversion of the imagination 
in mankind? 

Or turn once more to that fearful picture, not less 
fearful than true, of the absolute unspeakable cor- 
ruption of pagan life which Paul gives us in his 
Epistle to the Romans, and then take note of what 
he describes to be the root of this corruption. " They 
became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish 
hearts were darkened." Those who have written of 
those abominations of pagan life which find a record 
in such frescoes as one may still see at Pompeii, have 
usually spoken as if these things were the fruit of 
moral decay ; Paul would have called them not the 
fruit, but the seed, not the effect, but the cause. 
The corruption of imagination preceded the corrup- 
tion of life, and art has recorded that corrupt imag- 
ination for us. And so it has always been; so it will 
ever be ; it is that which proceedeth out of a man's 
heart that defileth him. And hence all redemption 
begins with the redemption of thought ; all purification 
with purity of mind, and it is in the chamber of 
imagery that those forces are begotten that redeem 
the soul, even as it is there also that the forces are 
begotten which destroy it. 

And now let me put to you this one question : What 
is it that goes on in your Chamber of Imagery? I 
need not point out the bearing of all that I have said 
on a young man's life, because we know well, that if 

264 



CHAMBERS OF IMAGERY 



ever the imagination is strong in us, it is in the days 
of youth. In that painted chamber of your mind, 
in that dim-lit theatre of your thought, the acts of 
all your future life rehearse themselves. Have you 
taken any serious notice of what goes on within you? 
Have you treated this incessant drama of your fancy 
merely as a pastime? Have you taken any pains to 
direct or curb this drama, to feed the mind with right 
thoughts, to supply this restless artist, which we call 
the Imagination, with right materials and right 
models, so that the picture on the wall shall be one 
you will not be ashamed for all the world to see, in 
the day when the secrets of all hearts are revealed? 

Do you, for instance, exercise any circumspection in 
your talk? There is a kind of talk, all too common 
among youths, which poisons the imagination ; do you 
indulge yourself in this talk? Or do you take any 
serious care in the selection of the books you read? 
There are books also which defile the mind, and which 
may fill it with ineffaceable pictures which are so 
many incentives to evil ; do you read them, not in the 
dispassionate way a critic might read them, but by 
preference and with greediness? And there are forms 
of art, also, which are a prostitution of art, even as 
in the ancient days of paganism ; and do you seek 
these, passing by all that is great and noble, all that 
is uplifting, that the lust of the eye may satiate itself 
upon things unworthy and even base? These are 
plain questions ; believe me they go to the very heart 

265 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



of life. Yet we are for the most part careless of 
them; and so long as our life is decent we trouble 
ourselves little or not at all over the nature of our 
thoughts, forgetting this most solemn truth that our 
thoughts are but our acts rehearsed. 

The chamber of imagery; could I indeed look into 
it, I should know all that there is to be known about 
you. We say sometimes that we may judge a man 
by his books, or by the company he keeps; we may 
judge him yet more accurately by the chamber of 
imagery in which he loves to dwell. When I saw the 
newly-opened apartments of the Borgias in the Vati- 
can at Rome, I seemed to see in those walls covered 
with gay and brilliant and voluptuous frescoes, all 
the history of the Borgias. When I stood, later, in 
the bare and quiet cell of Savonarola in Florence, I 
also read the secret of the man. In the one the 
voluptuous, in the other the austere; in the one the 
vain shows of life, in the other the serenity of eternity ; 
the one a banqueting house, the other a shrine. Each 
has left his record on the wall, and he who knows 
least of history feels the difference. He knows that 
Christ never trod within that splendid chamber of the 
profligate Pope, but that often Christ stood in that 
narrow cell, where Savonarola wept, and prayed, and 
toiled for the redemption of the city he loved so well. 

And so, I ask you, what are the pictures on the 
walls, what is the chamber of your imagery — a places 
of infamy or a shrine? 

266 



CHAMBERS OF IMAGERY 



I would plead with you for the religious culture 
of the imagination. I would implore you to treat 
your imagination seriously and reverently. I would 
ask you to notice in literature, if nowhere else, and 
there chiefly because the example is most readily per- 
ceived, the evil wrought by impure imagination, and 
the good wrought by the sanctified imagination, that 
you may learn how large a part imagination plays 
in influencing character. And then, I would ask you 
to enter your chamber of imagery, and ascertain what 
are the pictures on the walls. It may be that with 
some of you they are corrupt; with others they are 
merely vain and foolish pictures, which are incapable 
of inspiring any lofty deed or noble thought. O, that 
I could replace them with other pictures ! O, that it 
were in my power to fill your imagination with those 
immortal pictures from which the lives of men have 
received their noblest impulse and direction, these 
many centuries ! For I would fain paint there a pic- 
ture of the joyous innocence of Christ, that looking 
on it you might know how blessed is the man who is 
pure in heart. I would paint the picture of Jesus 
in His helpfulness towards mankind; with the little 
children in His arms, and the Magdalen at His feet, 
that you might know how happy is the life that is 
spent in doing good. And I would paint Him as He 
dies, young, ardent, beloved, yet willing to be sacri- 
ficed, that you might know what Divine triumph there 
is in the life that gives itself for others. And then 

267 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



over all these pictures I would paint a scroll, on which 
these words should shine in starry clearness, " Behold, 
I have given you an example; let the mind that was 
in Christ Jesus be in you." These are pictures which 
never fade, and in them the best life of the world has 
been nourished for nearly two thousand years. These 
are the pictures that make the chamber of imagery a 
temple and a shrine; and from such a shrine there 
flows not the influence that corrupts but redeems, there 
issues forth the life that is wise and lofty, pure and 
noble, and which has that divinest of all beauties, the 
beauty of Holiness. 



268 



THE REPROACH OF THE FLOWER 



XV 

THE REPROACH OF THE FLOWER 

A FLOWER SERMON 

"And is not the life more than meat?" — St. Matt. vi. 25. 
" And ye have therefore received Jesus Christ, the Lord, so 
walk ye in Him, rooted and built up in Him." — Col. ii. 6, 7. 

WHAT is the clearest thought, the most vivid 
impression that comes to us when we gather 
in such a service as this? Here there are around me 
the flowers of the earth, these delicate, fragile puri- 
ties and fragrances of the fields and gardens, each 
fashioned in exquisite art, each contributing elements 
of delight to the senses, each, as it were, a poem in 
colour, a symphony in grace. Is not the clearest im- 
pression this, that here we have the manifestations of 
a life, a life apparently quite different in essence and 
quality from life as it exists among men? Man's life 
is often a thing of sorrow and of labour; it is diffi- 
cult, it is perplexed, it is threatened; but here is a 
kind of life that seems to be simple and instinctive. 
Man, with infinite toil, builds up for himself a beauti- 
ful edifice of life : the flower, in silence and in the con- 
cord of all its parts and qualities, comes easily to its 

271 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



perfection. " The lily toils not nor spins," says 
Jesus ; yet it is arrayed in a glory which Solomon, in 
all his splendour and with all his seeking, never knew. 
A life, that is what we are confronted with, and a life 
different from our own. Side by side with our vexed 
human life, there is going on at this moment, through- 
out the wide world, a sweeter and a more gracious 
kind of life, of which we rarely think. Men may be 
counted, but who shall take a census of the flowers? 
Year by year the innumerable army of the flowers, 
beneath the banner of the sunlight, comes marching 
up over field and pasture, to possess the earth ; a living 
army, called forth by the breath of the Almighty. 
Think of that vast invasion, picture to yourself the 
delicate strength of this living host, and then you will 
come to some sense of the Divine mystery of life 
itself ; and that is what Jesus would have you think 
when He turns from the contemplation of the flowers 
of the field, and says to this weary, anxious congrega- 
tion gathered at His feet, " Is not the life, that life 
you are looking at, more than meat? " 

Read with care this familiar and gracious passage 
of the Sermon on the Mount, and I think you will see 
at once that this is Christ's thought, and you will 
see how He applies it. Christ sees the life of man, 
and what impresses Him most in the life of man, is 
its distraction, its disquietude, its misguidance. 
Christ sees the life of nature, and what impresses Him 
most in the life of nature, is its serenity, its efficiency, 

9Ti% 



REPROACH OF THE FLOWER 

the sureness of its development. The flower has, or 
seems to have, the happiness that man has not ; it ful- 
fils its true nature, which man seldom does. The lilies 
of the field are man's reproach. For, while man 
tramples over the whole earth with the lust of wealth 
or the lust of war in his heart, spoiling all he touches 
and spoiling himself in the process, the flower simply 
grows in obedience to Divine laws, written in its own 
nature. And the beauty of God rests upon the flowers 
of the field, while ugliness and distortion mark the 
path of man. What then is wrong with man ? Who 
is at fault that man, with all his infinite variety of 
powers, should stand ashamed before the humblest 
flower? The fault lies in man, and with man, because 
he has forgotten that the life is more than meat, he 
is more concerned over externals than internals, he 
acts as if his creed were that it is more important to 
get a living than to live, he seeks not to be something, 
but to get something. And it is from that cardinal 
error that Christ would redeem us by the healing spec- 
tacle of Nature. Nature works with but one object 
— the perfection of all her creatures. Her great con- 
cern is with the life, the adequate development of all 
the possibilities of life in each. Let man learn this 
lesson for himself, and then he will be on the way to 
be perfect, " even as the Father in Heaven is perfect." 
Let him root and ground himself in the thoughts of 
Jesus, and the world will again become the paradise 
and the very garden of God. But until man does this 

273 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



the flower will be his reproach ; he will stand ashamed 
before it, because the flower is for him the type of a 
perfect life which he, with all his seeking, does not 
find. 

The reproach of the flower — that then seems to me 
to be Christ's suggestion to us. Christ comes to us 
with the lilies of the field in His hand, and says, 
" Look at these, and then look upon your own soiled 
imperfect life ; come into the green places of the earth 
and rest with Me awhile that ye may learn of Me 
whom poets and prophets call the Lily of the Valley, 
the Rose of Sharon." There is a kind of life of which 
the flower is the living parable, asking from the 
world only the simplest things, becoming beautiful 
not for the sake of praise but for the satisfaction 
of laws written in its own nature, content to add a 
little brightness to the world and to cheer the hearts 
of men. The life of the flower — look at it and, 
when you look, ask whether the flower is not a re- 
proach to you. 

The reproach of the flower. First of all, we may 
say that the reproach of the flower is the reproach 
of simplicity. Why does Christ bid us look upon 
the flowers? Have they any spiritual lessons to im- 
part? Yes, they have the great lesson, and surely 
it is a spiritual lesson, of simplicity. Who is there 
of us who has not at some time or other felt 
this revelation of the beautiful simplicity that is in 
nature, when in summer days we have turned away 



REPROACH OF THE FLOWER 



from the city for a little time, and have sought the 
ancient haunts of peace where Nature is? Do you 
recall your reflections? If you recall them, did they 
not run somewhat in this channel? Did you not find 
yourself thinking in your own mind, " How poor and 
vain and vexed and trivial does that life seem that I 
I have been living, compared with this life where 
I know 'the silence that is in the starry sky, the 
sleep that is among the lonely hills?' How keenly 
do I feel that in all this stress and rush of city life, 
I may have followed but a vain dream, and disquieted 
myself in vain. Here is the old sweet life of Nature 
going on in such perfect quietness, and I am so full 
of disquietude and of anxiety." And then there 
came to you the thought that in the midst of this 
busy life of yours, perhaps you had really not lived at 
all. You had denied yourself " leisure to grow wise 
and shelter to grow ripe," The bank account had 
grown, it may be, but somehow you felt the soul 
had not thrived, and there came to you the revelation 
of simplicity; there came to you the thought that 
possibly, after all, your character would have been 
serener, your heart would have known more of the 
living pulse of joy, if you had lived a simple and a 
quiet life close to the heart of Nature. That was 
when the flower reproached you, that was when you 
felt the -reproach of the flower, and as you passed 
through the fields every daisy seemed to turn its eye 
up to you and rebuke you with the distraction, the 

275 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



lack of simplicity, the lack of content that was in 
your life. 

" The life is more than meat," says Christ. What 
life ? The word which Christ uses means " soul," 
for you recollect that upon another occasion Christ 
uses the same phrase when He says, " What shall 
it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose 
his own life, or his own soul? " Why are you not 
able to live a simple life? Let me say in parenthesis, 
by the phrase "simple life" I do not mean a life 
necessarily lived in the hamlet, or on the hill side, 
or in the lonely valley. Simple lives may be lived 
anywhere. But why is it we cannot live simple lives? 
It is because we do not believe in the soul enough. 
You do not feel God's life within you. If you did, 
you would care for no other life. Christ saw in His 
day a vast society, a vast civilisation, devoting all 
its energies to the creation of pleasures for the body, 
and He gave the true reason for it all. He said, in 
effect, that the Gentile nations had lost faith in the 
soul, and He stated plainly that material luxury, the 
growth of luxury, is the sole beatitude of Paganism. 
Where there is no genuine faith in the soul, no sense 
of God's life in us, then there is bound to follow the 
materialisation of society. But a revived faith in 
the soul always brings with it simplification of life. 
We are all ready to discuss the simple life to-day 
because we are all of us only too conscious of many 
elements of weariness in the complicated life we live, 

276 



REPROACH OF THE FLOWER 



but let us be sure of this, it is nothing but a spiritual 
revival that will make the simple life possible to us. 
We must find anew the God of the lilies before we 
are able to live in the quiet places where the lilies 
grow. And, if you think for a moment what the 
past history of our race has to teach, you will see 
how true that reflection is, for you will see that 
simplification of life has always followed the new 
birth of spirituality. The moment Buddha grasps 
the great truth that he is an emanation from God, 
that God is all, and in all, he can leave the palace 
and be a cheerful beggar by the wayside. The ma- 
terial has perished because the spiritual is born. In 
the same way St. Paul says that he knows " how to 
be abased and how to abound." Fulness and poverty 
are alike nothing to him, because his soul is lost in 
God. And it was so with Wordsworth. From the 
moment when the great thought of the mysticism 
of Nature possessed him, he preferred poverty with 
the vision of Nature to wealth without it. These 
men are different, their ideals, their methods and 
speech are different, but they are united in a real 
unity of experience. From the hour when the high- 
est things possess them the spell of the lower things is 
broken. And as it was with these men so it has 
always been throughout the long history of the ages. 
It was -so with the early Christians ; the birth of the 
soul in them, delivered them from the yoke of material- 
ism and the care for material luxury. It was so with 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



the Puritans ; living ever as in their Taskmaster's eye, 
they were indifferent to the praises of the world. And 
it must be so with us if ever we are to get that note of 
simplification struck again. But the simplification 
of society, lives of higher thinking, lives of plainer 
living, lives of purer feeling, will have to come 
through the rebirth of spiritual instinct and spir- 
itual desires. 

My brethren, are we rooted and grounded then in 
the simplicity of Christ? We can only become so 
by being rooted in the spirituality of Christ. We 
look back to that sacred idyll of Christ's Galilean 
ministry, and we think, possibly, how glorious and 
sweet it would have been to have walked with Him 
there by the lake's side and in the field of the lilies, 
listening to His talk, Who spake as never man spake 
of the things of Nature; but have you not noticed 
that those who were His companions in these scenes 
were all of them quite unworldly people; they were 
people who had given up all because they thought 
it worth while to give up all for the sake of the 
Divine comradeship? And it is so still. Simplifi- 
cation of life is found in increased spirituality of 
thought. The root of Christ's life was in God, and, 
if we are rooted in Christ as Christ was rooted in 
God, then there may come to us the possibility of 
that quiet, simple, contented life that Jesus Himself 
lived in the fields of Galilee. 

The reproach of the flower — it i§ again the re- 
278 



REPROACH OF THE FLOWER 



proach of faithfulness. "Faithfulness," we say: 
" pray what has faithfulness to do with the flower 
of the field? " Christ evidently thought it had some- 
thing to do -with it, for you will notice that He closes 
this talk about the flowers of the field with the sad 
apostrophe, "O ye of little faith!" Suppose for 
a moment one could attribute consciousness to these 
flowers, and that we could question them about the 
nature of their life, what sort of answer would they 
give? Might not the flower be imagined as replying 
to us thus : " I am but a tiny thing under the wide 
firmament with its great sun and its mystery of 
glittering stars, yet I know that I am not forgotten. 
Dews and sunbeams and rain and wind all come to 
me, each in its appointed season. Little as I am, 
I am God's partner in weaving the pageantry of 
summer. I do my little part in a humble place but 
I know that God has dealings with me. There is a 
kind of faith in me, faith that God will care for me, 
faith that God cares for my beauty and my perfec- 
tion, and so I am faithfully doing the exact thing 
God has given me to do, and waiting that God may 
do for me the thing I cannot do for myself." That 
is the confession of the flower. Is it our confession? 
How rare is such a confession on human lips! 
How few of us do really feel God's partnership in 
our little life! Throughout all Nature there lies 
this deep abiding law of faithfulness, the quiet 
fulfilment of the Divine plan, the meek acqui- 

279 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



escence in the Divine will, the whole creation 
resting on its God and waiting patiently for 
Him. But in man there is little of this faithful- 
ness. And so the flower reproaches us. And He 
Who speaks of flowers, and Whose life was one 
beautiful unfolding of meekness and faith, reproaches 
us in saying : " If God so clothe the grass of the field 
which to-day is and to-morrow is cast into the oven, 
shall He not much more clothe you, O ye of little 
faith!" Rooted in Christ — are we rooted in the 
steadfast faith and patience of Christ? For among 
all those great qualities which the life of Christ 
reveals to men, first of all stands His faithfulness. 
He never once murmured at His lot, even when it 
was hardest; He never scorned the place appointed 
for Him, even when it was lowliest. Most wonderful 
of all things in that wondrous life is the composure 
of Christ's mind, His serene trust in God. He felt 
the partnership with God in His life, with a complete- 
ness that no other ever realised. " I and the Father 
are One." Nothing could separate Him from God, 
not even the great dereliction of the Cross. And to 
be rooted in Christ is to have the same spirit of entire 
faithfulness, producing entire humility and com- 
posure and the peaceful unfolding of the soul into 
a beauty which is for God's eye alone, as it is wrought 
alone by the grace and the spirit of God. 

The reproach of the flower — it is, once more, the 
280 



REPROACH OF THE FLOWER 

reproach of beauty. If there is one thing in which 
all agree when we gaze at flowers, it is this — we feel 
the charm of their beauty. But, if we come to an- 
alyse beauty, what is beauty but another word for 
completeness? Why is the flower beautiful? Be- 
cause it is complete. You could not better it, with 
all your thinking, though you thought for a lifetime ; 
you could not add to the lily of the field, or even to 
the daisy, a single element that would be an added 
grace. It is complete. A friend of mine last week 
was good enough to send me some exquisite specimens 
of the bee-orchid with their marvellous mimicry of 
life, and as I looked upon that mimicry of life I felt 
the wonder of it, I felt that these flowers were flower- 
miracles; but yesterday I cut a common garden rose 
— and but a poor one at that — and looked into its 
beautiful convolutions for a moment before the petals 
fell, and the thought came to me that after all that 
was quite as marvellous as the bee-orchid, and quite 
as beautiful. For wherever there is completeness 
there is beauty. The design of God is so uniformly 
beautiful that we have only to obey the design to 
attain beauty, and it is only when we disregard the 
design of God that we arrive at ugliness. Show 
me completeness anywhere, in the daisy, in the rose, 
in the child, in the human mind, in the development of 
a human life, and you show me beauty. And there 
is no beauty where there is not completeness. But 

281 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



of all beautiful things in this world, a complete hu- 
man life is the most beautiful. I mentioned in a re- 
cent address an article which had struck me in one 
of the art magazines, an article describing Claydon 
House in Buckinghamshire. The house is one of 
the houses beautiful of England. Pages were taken 
up with descriptions of its carvings, its pictures, its 
staircases, the marvels of its wrought iron and ex- 
quisite marqueterie, and so forth; and then at the 
very end of the article it was mentioned that there 
was a little plain room upstairs that had no art 
adornment whatever, but it was in that room Florence 
Nightingale dwelt. And on the walls were no historic 
pictures, but only crude scenes in the Crimean War. 
Only that. Ah! but I felt that that room was the 
true shrine of the whole place. There a soul had 
lived, there a spiritual life had gone on, and that 
was the glory of the house. It gave a beauty to it. 
You can get no beauty in human life except through 
the beautiful soul. Houses are poor things until 
love comes into them and makes them homes, and the 
house of life is a poor thing until the spirit of God 
takes possession of the inner shrine and makes the 
life complete. Would you live a beautiful life? 
Let it be a complete life, and what this completion is 
the great Apostle tells you — Rooted in Christ, 
grounded in Christ, established in Christ — and here 
is the final phrase, "complete in Him" That life 



REPROACH OF THE FLOWER 



alone I count a beautiful life which is a complete life, 
and for the true completion of our life we must be 
rooted in Christ, and grow in His grace, that we 
may attain to His image. 

The reproach of beauty. As our eyes rest on 
these exquisite and perfected works of Nature's art, 
do we feel the reproach of beauty, do we feel how 
unbeautiful our lives often are, how little of grace and 
perfume there is in them, how thwarted and impov- 
erished and deflected from God's design they are? 
Why ? The reason with many of us — and I speak 
now to those who call themselves Christians — the 
reason is that we are rooted upon Christ, rather 
than rooted m Christ; we are parasites. The ivy 
clings to the oak, but it is easily separable from it, 
because it has no part in the root and in the life of 
the oak; so some of us are clinging to the surfaces 
of Christianity, to its outward forms and functions, 
but our root has never yet struck deep into the life 
of Christ. The roots of your life, the fibres in which 
the vital sap runs, what of these ? You and I can an- 
swer that question best for ourselves. For some of us, 
it may be, that the real root of our life is in pride 
and vanity; for others it is in worldliness and 
pleasure ; for others it is in secret sins and in the cor- 
rupt and evil will. And there can be no beauty in 
such a life, there will blossom no perfect flower from 
such a root. Look to the roots of your life then, 



THE DIVINE CHALLENGE 



for that is the final message of the flowers. All that 
is of beauty in the flowers has its source is some- 
thing that is out of sight. So the beautiful life 
is a life whose root is hid with Christ in God. Of 
all the world's great needs to-day, there is no need so 
great as a more pure and perfect life among Chris- 
tians. It is the poor and dwarfed blossom of moral 
beauty that we find in the lives that are called Chris- 
tian that is the great hindrance to Christianity. 
Remember, creeds and professions have very little 
weight with men now-a-days — less than they ever 
had. It is lives that count, and to-day, as in the 
early days of Christianity, it is the spectacle of 
lives, manifestly beautiful in ideals and conduct, in 
spirit and temper, that set men thinking, and pres- 
ently set them seeking for the secret of Jesus. How 
are we to live such lives? Only by being rooted in 
Christ, rooted in His faith, rooted in His character, 
His thoughts, His deeds, His spirit and temper. He 
calls us, He entreats us to share His most secret life, 
telling us that He is the Vine and we are the branches. 
And so let us join in prayer to the Vine of God, that 
He may take our lives into His own, we rooted in Him 
and He in us for evermore. 

Deep strike Thy root, O Heavenly Vine, 

Within our earthly sod, 
Most beautiful, yet most divine, 

The Flower of man and God. 
284 



REPROACH OF THE FLOWER 

Rooted, grounded, stablished, complete in Christ — 
that is the life beautiful that we each may live, and 
this is also "life eternal to know the only true God 
and Jesus Christ whom He hath sent." 



THE END 



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